Escape Velocity (The Quantum War Book 1)

by Jonathan Paul Isaacs

  “How are you doing?”

  “I’m okay, Lieutenant.”

  Maya’s body language screamed she was anything buy okay. He needed to get her to talk. “What do you make of what happened earlier?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “I thought we might be goners there. Lost, in the dark, hard to even think.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “What were you feeling as we ran?” Wyatt asked, pushing.

  He could see her jaw clench, her face tighten. She turned away. Silence stretched out between them.

  “Maya. We’re in this together. It’s okay.”

  She finally answered in a whisper. “I was so scared.”

  “I know. Me too.”

  “It hurt so much. Those specks.” Maya blotted her eye with the back of her hand, trying to be discrete.

  “Yeah.”

  More silence. A few moments passed before Maya seemed to regain her composure.

  “When I came here,” she said, “when I transferred to Caustic Team, I thought we’d be boarding spacecraft. Doing raids against Oscars. I was prepared for that. I worked on engagement protocol, marksmanship, close-quarters battle. It’s just ... I guess I wasn’t ready for whatever happened in town over there.”

  Wyatt suddenly felt guilty that he was the reason they weren’t doing those things. He suppressed a grimace. “Well, we’ll be more prepared now going forward. It’s a good lesson for us to be prepared. Even if we’re doing a recon on our own colony.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t protect us better.”

  “What?”

  “I shot at those people. I missed a bunch, even with my CORE helmet.”

  “Those specks seemed to disrupt our comms. Maybe they affected your targeting.”

  “And I didn’t do a very good job navigating.”

  “Well—”

  “And Corpsman Watanabe got hurt.”

  “None of us understood what was happening—”

  “I was just so scared.” Her voice cracked.

  “Maya. Stop.”

  She stared hard at the deck.

  “Look,” he said, “we made it out. That’s what counts. We’re smarter now. Izzy’s stable. You did fine.”

  “Yes, sir.” She nodded, and blotted her eyes again.

  “You did fine,” he repeated.

  “Aye, aye. Sorry for all this. I’ll toughen up.”

  Maya took a deep breath and that seemed to level her. She managed a weak smile. He clasped her shoulder and pushed back up.

  Wyatt didn’t like this. He needed his troopers composed. As the squad leader, he had to apply encouragement and reinforcement in equal measure to keep everyone mentally squared away. Laramie helped the delivery a lot in that department. But with four new troopers on a remote deployment, he couldn’t afford any of them losing their mental edge.

  Then again, they were only human. Was helping Maya any different than what Father Bradley had done for him?

  A clatter echoed off the cargo ramp. Wyatt turned to see Gavin and Rahsaan clomping inside. He realized their watch must be over.

  “See anything out there?” he asked.

  “A lot of empty.” Gavin set his L-6 Viper against a bulkhead and tossed his helmet right after it, barely missing the SuperMag scope. “I shot some of those vulture-looking bastards. A couple kept coming after us, thinking we were food.”

  “Who’s out there now?”

  “Carlos and Kenny.”

  Wyatt nodded. His eyes fell back on Izzy, sleeping quietly on his pallet.

  “Lieutenant,” Gavin drawled.

  “Yeah?”

  He motioned toward their corpsman. “He’ll be okay, Lieutenant. He’s RESIT. He’s tough.”

  He thought back to Maya. “I hope so.”

  For Gavin, who generally didn’t talk much, the acknowledgment was solidarity accomplished. He started to walk away.

  “I need to understand what happened to him,” Wyatt said quietly, more to himself than anyone.

  The bearded sergeant stopped and scratched his chin. “What you told me sure didn’t make a lot of sense. A bunch of people in some kind of séance? Weird.”

  “We couldn’t tell if they were hurt, dead, whatever.” Wyatt replayed the encounter in his mind, searching for any new insight. “Izzy approached one of them. He started to talk to her. And then all that stuff started to go down.”

  “And you don’t think it was anything in the air? A nerve agent?”

  How did Wyatt explain that the pain seemed to emanate from the people themselves?

  “I don’t think so. When we shot the people, the pain went away. When you shot the guys moving toward me in the alley, same thing. I don’t know how to describe what they were doing. It just sounds corny.”

  “Hostile telepathy,” Gavin offered.

  “Yeah. See? Worse than corny.”

  “At least we know hostile gunfire works.” The sergeant turned to leave again. “I’m going to grab some chow.”

  “Hey—thanks for saving my ass.”

  “You’re welcome. Remember—bourbon.”

  At least Gavin was completely unfazed. Wyatt managed a chuckle, then forced himself to climb into his command chair. He flopped down and pressed a neural stub to his temple, trying to ignore the unpleasant medicinal smell of the adhesive.

  A computer interface appeared in his field of vision. He tapped through several icons to update his mission report. So far, he wasn’t doing very well achieving his objectives.

  His team had not secured Thermopylae Gate.

  Their Javelin was damaged, their ascent booster lost.

  One of his troopers lay in a coma.

  He still had no useful intel around the shutdown in interplanetary shipping, the hostile posture of RESIT Team Dagger, or the situation with Juliet in general.

  And with no troop carrier in orbit, he had no one to contact for backup. This was an Earth colony, but for all intents and purposes they might as well been operating covertly behind enemy lines. On their own.

  Wyatt sighed. They had to get into Venice—the capital city, home to two million people, the seat of planetary government.

  His squad already had a rough plan to insert covertly via the train system. If they set up an observation post, then maybe they could gather intel about what had happened in Parrell and whether it was connected to the blockade in place at Thermopylae.

  It was a race against time to complete all this before the next transit window opened. Wyatt had to recover their mission with some sort of valuable intelligence, and avoid being marooned groundside.

  Flashbacks of Major Beck crossed his mind. Guilt makes you second-guess, make bad decisions.

  He felt so alone.

  Wyatt closed his mission log and began to search the Javelin database for any information he could find on maglev trains.

  12

  Lo River

  Juliet, Alpha Centauri A

  22 February 2272

  “I have contact,” the copilot said. “Seven o’clock, one hundred eighty knots closure.”

  Laramie jumped to her feet and leaned past Wyatt into the flight deck just as the engines flared to life. The holo monitor displayed an orange carat representing the cargo train. Beyond the canopy, a landscape of rolling grasslands swayed in the wind beyond the idle Javelin.

  Wyatt turned and jumped at Laramie’s presence. “You ready?”

  “Born ready, LT. Is that our maglev?”

  Wyatt gave her a stilted nod. “Yep.”

  “How long?”

  “Six minutes. Get the squad ready.”

  “Aye, aye.”

  He didn’t make eye contact. Instead, he brusquely brushed past her to strap down in his command chair next to the hatch.

  Laramie ordered her troopers to gear up and barely got back to her own seat before the Javelin tilted off the ground. She glanced again down the cargo bay at the lieutenant. Wyatt was usually cool under fire, decisive and confident. This
distracted, angry edginess creeping into his behavior bothered her.

  She needed whatever it was gone. She needed him solid, because the truth was she was having trouble keeping focused herself.

  Parrell had shaken all of them, but no one more than Laramie.

  Whatever happened in that sleepy frontier town, Laramie was scared to death of what might be happening elsewhere. Rubble and wreckage in the streets. Bodies rotting inside abandoned buildings. Residents turning on each other with lethal intent.

  The terrifying ordeal at the rec center.

  The memory of the incandescent embers still burned into her mind as if they were trying to melt her soul away and leave an empty shell. If it had happened at Parrell, could it have happened back home? Were Mom and Dad slumped against some street sign, being picked apart by karks? Jessamy? Her brothers?

  A pang of guilt twisted her gut. She hadn’t seen any of them in person in almost two years. RESIT was making her miss the regular cadence of her family.

  You better make sure they’re safe, then.

  “Four minutes,” Teo said.

  She took a deep breath and forced herself to focus on the troopers in her charge. Her surrogate family.

  Laramie did a visual check on the squad down the fuselage. Rahsaan and Maya wore CORE helmets. The rest had on goggles. Laramie had decided on the latter. CORE helmets were great for confined spaces and firefights, but climbing around on an open maintenance platform while a train moved at high speed? She’d rather keep her spatial awareness intact. The airflow just outside the aeroshell was too dangerous, and she didn’t want to chance getting blown off into the grasslands.

  At ninety seconds to intercept, the crew chief dropped the rear cargo door. Laramie’s ears popped as the air pressure fled into the roar of the wind. Outside, the grasslands gave way to the rocky terrain of a shallow canyon. A narrow river snaked back and forth a hundred meters below with rapids that tossed water upward in great plumes. She could practically taste the humidity.

  “Gavin, ready up!” she called.

  Their third-in-command lumbered aft with their big projectile gun. He locked the weapon struts to the deck and loaded it with a harpoon projectile.

  Teo’s voice crackled through the comm. “Coming up on the track, port side.”

  The train came into view and approached the Javelin from behind, closing fast on an elevated monorail that hugged the riverbank. A dozen connected carriages, each shaped like an upside-down U, slid over the rail’s modulated magnetic field at an excess of any sane velocity.

  “It’s moving too fast!” Laramie said.

  “The bend is coming up,” Teo replied. “It’ll slow down to take the turn. Ten seconds.”

  Laramie watched as the train stormed toward them. She had never seen one up close like this. The sloped nose of the lead car paved the way for a series of cargo containers mounted on the maglev carriages themselves. A system of catwalks crisscrossed the containers behind the slipstream.

  A glint of something shiny caught her eye.

  She scanned the train cars to find it again, but everything was moving so fast that whatever it might have been, it was out of her vision now. The train looked like it might blast past them right underneath the Javelin. But true to Teo’s prediction, the track banked into a gentle curve and the train began to slow.

  “Line up the shot!” Wyatt told Gavin.

  Gavin flipped off the safety. He aimed down the barrel of the projectile gun, pointing it at one of the cargo containers.

  Laramie’s stomach knotted up as she peeked past the edge of the ramp. The floor of the canyon slid by far below, treacherous and unforgiving. She wondered what hitting the bottom would feel like if she fell. Would it be over quick? Or would it be a crippling agony of broken bones and ruptured body parts?

  She toed her way forward. As the senior enlisted officer, she got to go first. The things she did for her troopers.

  “Weapons free!” Wyatt yelled.

  A second later, Gavin pulled the trigger. A hollow foomp filled the fuselage as harpoon and towline streaked out the open door. A moment later it buried itself into the metal skin of one of the train’s containers.

  He locked the towline winch. “Line is secure!”

  “Clip on!”

  Eight troopers clipped carabiners to the line and sounded off in succession, starting with Laramie and ending with Wyatt.

  Laramie’s throat felt tight. She realized her hands were squeezing the zipline and forced herself to unclench. Space was so much better. There was no such thing as down.

  “Go, go, go!”

  Laramie leaped into the empty air. The sudden slide against the towline interrupted her freefall and she careened toward the train, landing a moment later on the expanded metal catwalk that wrapped around the maglev carriages.

  She unclipped herself and moved forward to secure the landing area and make room for the others. Even though this part of the rail line was “slower,” the ground still swept by to the wicked roar of rushing air. Laramie avoided looking down as she pressed forward toward the lead car.

  Again, a glint caught her eye ahead of her.

  Was it her nerves playing tricks on her? She squinted to find it again. The sudden rising pitch of the Javelin’s engines pulled her attention away, and Laramie looked up to see Teo veering off, leaving seven other troopers lined up in single file behind her.

  The ambient noise increased as the train began to accelerate out of its long turn.

  On the catwalk, the air remained relatively still thanks to the train’s aeroshell. Laramie vaguely recalled something in school about how the nose cone of a train ionized the air so that its electromagnetic field could push it aside. But the loud roar just a meter above her head served as an angry reminder of how fast they were moving—without any kind of safety equipment other than a simple hand railing.

  Laramie returned to pushing out of the landing zone and suddenly froze.

  Her gut told her something wasn’t right. Aside from boarding, there shouldn’t have been any danger on an automated train hauling chunks of metal.

  But that glint ...

  She crouched on the catwalk and pulled her Vector off its chest harness.

  “Talk to me, Laramie,” Wyatt’s voice crackled in her earpiece. “You see something?”

  “Stand by.”

  Laramie leaned forward against the steady pull of the train’s increasing speed. She spied a wider platform ahead, a sort of superficial scaffolding that crossed to the other side of the train between adjacent cargo containers. Maybe she could get a better view of the area from there.

  “I keep thinking I’m seeing something, LT. Going to scout it out.”

  “Copy that.” A pause. “These are automated cargo trains, right?”

  “Ever since I’ve lived here.”

  “All right. We’ll advance behind you.”

  The train was really going now. Wind howled past them at hundreds of knots as the monorail’s maglev nodes propelled the carriages forward. Laramie reached the platform between the adjacent train carriages. Stairs climbed up to a wide grating that spanned the train’s cross section. Another set of stairs led down to the other side. A distant thought crossed her mind around whether the train engineers normally left maintenance scaffolding on during operations. Maybe their removal slowed down the turnaround time?

  The scaffoldings were near enough to each other to provide easy access between train carriages. Laramie started across the platform.

  Then she saw what it was.

  Her body reacted before her mind did. Laramie slammed to the deck just as a laser bolt hit the cargo container next to her. A spray of wet metal rained on her back and arms.

  “Contact front!” She struggled to pull her Vector from underneath her.

  She heard Wyatt bark terse orders to the others. Ahead of her, a head bobbed past the forward cargo container and shot again. Return fire flew overhead from her teammates. Laramie could smell the ozone of
the ionized air from the exchange.

  Then, silence. Laramie lifted her head and saw her teammates didn’t have a good angle on the shooter. She also realized she was a sitting duck if she remained on the platform.

  More laser fire suddenly burned the air over the platform. Laramie peeked to her left, saw how the catwalks on the side of the cargo container were lower than the cross platform, and instinctively rolled sideways to get to cover. An instant later she pushed herself down the stairs.

  Several shots melted holes through the structure around her. Laramie shouldered her Vector but didn’t dare expose herself to the incoming barrage.

  “I need covering fire!” she shouted.

  The comm came to life with the sound of an intense gunfight behind Wyatt’s voice. “We’re in contact on the other side. Multiple targets. Hang tight, trying to get to you.”

  She held her Vector above her head and squeezed the trigger. Her shots went high left. She tried again, this time punching random holes in the cargo container walls.

  Laramie cursed the compact design of her weapon, great for boarding in the confined space of spacecraft but not when the target took cover at distance. She cursed her choice to not wear a CORE helmet like Maya and Rahsaan.

  Most of all, she cursed that she was going to get a hole burned in her.

  Laser shots snapped over her and she ducked back behind the stair hanger. Through the expanded metal grating she could see more enemy targets appearing, four in all. Two let loose a barrage that ravaged the structure around her. She jerked away as more hot particles of vaporized metal hit her cheeks.

  The other pair would be advancing on her while she kept her head down. She had no choice but to engage, even if it got her shot. She’d be shot anyway.

  She raised her Vector to fire back. Before she pulled the trigger, one of the enemy’s heads exploded in a spray of pink mist.

  Thank God. Wyatt.

  Another blast came from behind her. She twisted her head to see several silhouettes advancing on her position. Her mind reeled as it tried to catch up. The tactical positions were all wrong…

  “Wyatt, are you coming up behind me?” she asked.

  A pause. “Negative. What’s behind you?”

  She looked again. The silhouettes were crouched down and moving toward her. The lead one raised a weapon and the crackle of an energy blast sizzled above her.