by Rick Partlow
“I think they’ve figured out we’re here,” I heard the dry humor in Conner’s voice over my implant ‘link, but I was fairly certain he hadn’t said the words aloud, not with this kind of acceleration pushing his lungs flat.
“I don’t know if this thing will work if they shoot that gravity shit at us,” Al Amari said. “Gabbert, target that ship and prepare to fire on my command.”
He didn’t sound strained either, and I had the sense that Al Amari and all his people were jacked and implanted at least as much as I was, and maybe closer to the extent that Conner, Cowboy and the other Glory Boys had been. I should have guessed that already; there’s no way Murdock would have sent them on this part of the mission, otherwise.
“Is it my imagination?” Conner wondered a moment later, “or is the glow around that ship getting brighter?”
“We’re at a thousand kilometers,” Al Amari said. “I suppose that’s about as close as we’re likely to get. Fire, Gabbert.”
“Weapons has the stick,” Conner intoned, giving attitude control up to Gabbert.
There was a hammer-blow bang of maneuvering thrusters that jerked my head painfully to the side, and then barely a second later I heard the woman respond, “Firing.”
It might have been my imagination, but I thought the lights on the display dimmed and the holographic projection shimmered. Or maybe it was spacetime that shimmered. Either way, the pulse of whatever from that Skrela weapon struck the Predecessor ship only a microsecond after Gabbert pulled the trigger.
I’d expected a reaction like the one in the lab, but it looked so much more spectacular on this scale. The emerald halo expanded instantly, like a supernova, and I had a second’s mindless panic at the thought it would swallow us up, but just as quickly as it had swollen, it contracted. And then it was gone. No explosion, no wreckage, no sign that it had ever existed.
The relief I felt was multiplied by the fact that Conner had cut the ship’s acceleration back to one gravity and I was suddenly able to suck in a lungful of air and rise up against my seat. I could hear Gabbert laughing hoarsely, but Al Amari was all business.
“Next ship in the formation,” he snapped. “Before they can react!”
This time I felt it, and it wasn’t a trick of my acceleration-addled brain; something like a wave that seemed to come from all around us and pass through the ship, drawing force from somewhere and directing it like a water hose. We were farther away this time, and when the effect hit, the green glow around the next Predecessor ship flickered on and off but didn’t expand and wasn’t extinguished. The alien ship seemed to spin on its axis as its halo flickered, but then it steadied and started to aim itself straight at us once again.
“Shit!” I hissed involuntarily.
“Fire again, Lieutenant,” Al Amari ordered, this time letting a little stress into his voice.
“Aye, sir.”
She’d barely spoken the words before another pressure wave passed through us on its way to the cylindrical vessel. This time we got it; the expanding sphere of light seemed like it came only meters from enveloping us, and then it vanished into nothingness. I had a sense from a combination of my own knowledge of physics and what my headcomp was telling me that its gravity waves had been redirected by the weapon and used to cause it to collapse in on itself like a black hole, but that was just speculation. I might as well have been an ant trying to guess what caused the rain.
“The final vessel is turning tail,” Conner said, and I saw on the tactical display that he was right. “At least I think it’s her tail,” he added drily. “Either way, she’s running.”
The last of the three ships from the formation was already accelerating at twenty gravities in a direction that would take it out of the system; in seconds, it would be out of our sensor range and at a good fraction of light-speed.
“Let her run,” Al Amari decided. “She’s somebody else’s problem. Set a course for Petra, five-g acceleration. Let’s finish this.”
Chapter Eighteen
Petra looked like Hell. Greys and yellows and stark whites were the universe’s ugly warnings that this was not a place for humans. Chlorine clouds rained hydrochloric acid into lakes of it, or froze it into snow near the poles, promising a painful death to anyone who ventured outside without the protection of a vacuum suit. Nothing stirred under its charcoal-grey skies, nothing showed even the slightest sign of habitation; not even the Predecessors could have turned this place into a living world.
Certainly, the last thing I would have expected to find on a hell-hole like this was a huge metal dome five hundred meters across, floating on a lake of hydrochloric acid formed by an ancient impact crater. Yet there it was, defying God and good sense and daring us to come down and kick its ass.
“There’s the landing pad,” Conner told Al Amari, pointing to a platform at least a hundred meters on a side, suspended out over the lake, the deceptively tranquil waves lapping at its thick, BiPhase Carbide supports. Two small flyers flanked a large, matte-black cutter that I knew belonged to Murdock’s force. Next to them was the square outline of a gantry elevator heading somewhere deeper into the base, and maybe under the lake.
“Main lock is there, for cargo,” Conner went on. “There’s a smaller, auxiliary pad with a lock just for personnel a quarter of the way around the dome.”
I saw what he was talking about, a pad just big enough for an atmospheric flyer, barely sticking out from the wall of the slate-grey dome.
We were banking around the perimeter of the lake at a kilometer up on jets of coldgas, and there’d been no sign yet that we’d been spotted. The rest of the squadron was a few minutes behind us, having dealt with the CSF lighters and established contact with the main flotilla. Their last broadcast had told us that the command cutter had flown on ahead to Petra under enemy control, and I thought that had to be Cowboy’s work. As to why we hadn’t been detected…well, as stealthy as this boat was, I felt sure that had to be Murdock’s doing. Someone down below must have been distracting everyone, though I couldn’t say for sure how.
“Here’s the plan,” Al Amari said, and I knew he was sending it to the ‘links of everyone on board as well as the trailing ships. “We don’t have time to wait for the rest of the squadron to get here, so we’re breaking up into two teams. Munroe, you and your people are getting dropped at the main landing platform; I want you to make your way down into their main hangar and secure any assault shuttles or other attack craft you find, and by ‘secure’ I mean blow them up.
“After we drop you, my team and Captain Conner will turn things over to the Ombre’s AI and do a low-altitude drop onto the auxiliary lock and hopefully infiltrate simultaneously with you. Then the ship will land on the lake shore and wait for our pick-up order. The rest of the squadron will come in behind us and let out half the teams at each entry and provide support.
“Are we clear?”
“Aye, sir,” I said, and was echoed by voices from our ship and, after a few seconds, by the others.
“Gear up, people,” Al Amari barked, taking a black, byomer hood out of a pouch on his belt and pulling it over his face. “Take us down, Captain Conner.”
The others were already in the utility bay by the time I got there, steadying myself against the swaying of the ship with a touch here and there on the bulkhead as I walked. Vilberg and Sanders were settling their interface halos on to control the reflex armor, and Kurt was still securing his helmet to the yoke of his armored vest, but Victor was squared away and he tossed a helmet at me as I came into the bay. I snagged it out of the air and braced myself against a hibernation pod to pull it on.
“One last time, guys,” I said over the helmet’s ‘link, grabbing my beamer from the open locker. “For Bobbi.”
“We’re still getting paid for this, right?” Vilberg asked. The four of us stared at him and he raised an open palm. “I’m just kidding!”
He was spared any further disdain by a roar of belly jets that made us all rock fo
rward as the ship came to a hover and the belly ramp began to descend.
“Go! Go! Go!” I was yelling it to them as Al Amari was yelling it into my ‘link, and I led the way.
The ramp was hovering a good three meters off the landing platform when I jumped, but between the slightly-lower-than-standard gravity on Petra and the exoskeletal reflex armor, I didn’t even feel a twinge when my boot soles hit the surface. I glanced back over my shoulder and saw the ship already rising on columns of fire, the ramp nearly closed. Kurt stumbled forward from his drop, the last one out, and hurried over to the outer wall, taking a position next to the main airlock, a few meters down from Victor.
There wasn’t a soul around, unsurprisingly; this wasn’t a place you’d leave live guards outside and apparently, they weren’t too worried about intrusion. I guess I wouldn’t be, either, if I lived in the middle of a lake of hydrochloric acid. I tugged the cracking module they’d issued me off my equipment belt and set its adhesive side to the ID plate next to the airlock, feeling it ‘link up with my headcomp. It took a good ten seconds to tell me that the damned airlock wasn’t going to open.
“Son of a bitch!” I muttered aloud. “They’ve got an emergency lockdown under way…this airlock has been manually sealed.”
“Do they know we’re here?” Sanders wondered.
“No, I think something’s going down inside,” I guessed. “Either way, that door ain’t opening.”
“What the hell are we gonna’ do now?” Sanders wondered. “Even these damned things,” he gestured with his beamer, “aren’t going to cut through this airlock.”
“Not these,” I agreed, feeling a smile spread slowly across my face as I glanced back at the cutter Cowboy had hijacked. Its nose was pointed directly at the lock…and so was the proton cannon emitter. And I even had the right codes for her.
“But I know something that will.”
The airlock was large and heavy duty, two solid blocks of BiPhase Carbide with ten meters between them to load cargo from the landing platform. One blast from the Fleet Intelligence cutter’s proton cannon turned it into a jagged, charred, smoldering hole. Dust and debris and a hazy fog of ice particles flew out of the gap as the denser, warmer atmosphere inside rushed to get out and equalize the pressures.
“They know we’re here now,” Sanders commented with a chuckle as we rushed out of the cutter’s cockpit, heading back for the open belly ramp.
Vilberg and the Simaks had already been sheltered in the lee of the ramp and they were halfway across the landing platform by the time we exited the ship. I could hear the distorted, tinny sound of alarms ringing in the thin atmosphere, could see the red and yellow flashing of warning lights glaring in the white fog that still hung around the devastated entrance. Bits of charred things that might once have been human were half-hidden by the mist; and across the rough, buildfoam floor I could see others who’d survived the blast choking and collapsing and dying as they tried in vain to outrun the chlorine atmosphere we’d allowed into the dome.
I felt a crawling sensation on the back of my neck, watching them clutch at their throats, coughing up blood as the poison in the air burned away the lining of their lungs. It was a bad way to die. I wanted to tell myself they deserved it, but if they did, why didn’t I?
Victor was walking point about twenty meters ahead of me, with Kurt and Vilberg in a wedge behind him and to the sides, watching the approaches ahead of us, but my attention was on a stairwell off to the right of the entrance, sheltered under an alcove up against the curved wall of the dome. It had to lead down to the hangar bay under the lake, and I could already see an emergency pressure seal swinging down out of the ceiling to block it off, triggered by the automatic systems when we’d blown the lock.
I raised my beamer and targeted the servos pushing the seal down from a recessed chamber in the side of the dome, then touched the trigger pad. My visor filters blacked out for a millisecond, leaving a white, coruscating line as an after-image, but my headcomp was still watching through the helmet’s exterior cameras and shared with my contact lens a muted version of the glowing white blast of vaporized metal when the beam hit. The emergency seal jerked downward another meter on the weakened metal extension arms, then cut loose on one end and swung downward to slam into the side of the wall. The impact caused the already-weakened connective bonding on the other side of the huge metal plate to fail as well and it tumbled to the floor with a thunderous crash only centimeters from the stairwell.
“This way!” I called to the others, scrambling around the edge of the safety railing then heading down the narrow staircase two steps at a time.
The ceiling panels were flickering and dim inside the stairwell, but the emergency chemical strip lights were steady, and they were plenty for my helmet’s IR filters. I could see dust spiraling upward as air still rushed out towards the hole where the airlock had been, coming from below, probably from the floor below, where Al Amari had thought their spacecraft hangar would be, below the elevator gantry. I hit the first landing hard, digging the spiked soles of my combat boots and shuffling to a stop before I slammed into the wall.
I turned and was about to head down the next flight; I don’t know what stopped me, whether it was some sound or shadow reaching my helmet sensors and through them to my headcomp faster than I could register consciously, but I didn’t take the next step. That’s why the flaring line of laser pulses that exploded up the stairwell blasted a fist-size hole in the wall instead of taking my head off. I jerked backwards as the spray of vaporized buildfoam and plastic hit me, not hurting me through my armor but coating my visor with black, smoking residue.
My headcomp and the helmet worked together in microseconds to pull together a real-time image from my exterior cameras and various helmet sensors on my HUD just in time to see the second burst pass a meter above me, narrowly missing Sanders, who’d been right behind me. I lunged forward, fighting the veneer of unreality that the projected images gave everything, and started firing my beamer before I even had a target. The stairwell lit up like the inside of a fusion reactor and the blast of electrons melted away the top part of the pressure door down below.
I had the briefest of glimpses of the helmeted head of a CSF trooper who’d been propping it open before he ducked back inside and let what was left of it swing shut. The top corner was twisted and mangled and smoking, so the door wouldn’t form a pressure seal, and I could see a fine spray of ice coming through where the air inside was still seeking equalization. It would probably be enough to keep the hangar bay habitable, at least for a while. We needed to get down there, and there wasn’t time to do it the safe, sane way.
I jumped. It was a good ten meters down to the door, and it seemed like I was suspended in mid-air for hours, until time began to speed up to twice-normal as I slammed into the wall at the bottom. The reflex armor hardened to protect me, but I still felt the air leave me in a hollow whoosh inside my helmet and the electron beamer slipped out of my hands, yanking hard against its sling and nearly sending me down to the floor with it.
My headcomp worked together with the reflex armor and I snatched the weapon out of the air, turning a lurch forward into a lunge for the door. I don’t know if they’d tried to secure it, but it wouldn’t even shut completely with the top twisted and melted out of alignment, much less lock. I yanked it open and fired the beamer through the gap before it was even wide enough for me to squeeze through.
I’d guessed right; there’d been two of them waiting for me right on the other side, fully armored in flat black, with the mirrored visors of the Corporate Security Force. They’d been smart enough to off-set from the doorway enough that my initial shot didn’t hit them, but it did pass close enough to stun them and knock them back on their heels before it spent itself in a blinding explosion on the side of a loading jack.
I shifted the emitter and blasted the closest of them through the chest; he was blown completely in half and most of his chest was just gone, vaporized in a crac
k of thunder I could feel in my sinuses. The other man tumbled to the floor, covered in burning, black blood, and I transitioned to my sidearm, putting a round through his faceplate instead of wasting the limited shots in my power pack on him.
It was only then that I got a good look at where I was. This was the main hangar, all right; I was standing next to the elevator gantry that led up to the surface, to the landing platform, and spread out before me, in a space that had to be nearly as big as the dome itself, were four assault shuttles and a star courier.
Alarms were still sounding, less tinny and more blaring here in the thicker atmosphere, farther away from the breach in the dome. I could see technicians, support crews and CSF troopers here and there, some milling around in confusion, others running from one emergency to another…and one squad heading my way from across the hangar, spreading out into a tactical wedge formation. Not all of them even had their armor completely on, and only two of the ten had helmets, but they’d all managed to grab weapons and I ducked back into the stairwell doorway as laser pulses started spalling off the buildfoam of the interior walls.
“Jesus, Boss,” Sanders said as he pounded down the stairs behind me. “How about leaving some for us?”
“There’s a whole bunch of them coming this way if you’re feeling froggy,” I told him, scraping a gloved hand over my faceplate to clean off the melted buildfoam.
I leaned out and hosed a long shot into the last spot where I’d seen two of the squad within a couple meters of each other. I wasn’t sure if I hit any of them, but I did rip a sizable gouge out of the left wing of one of the shuttles. Then Sanders and Vilberg were beside me in the doorway and firing their beamers, splashing crackling streams of ionic fire in the general direction of the CSF troopers and sending them scrambling for cover behind two of the shuttles.
