Escape Velocity (The Quantum War Book 1)

by Jonathan Paul Isaacs

  “Contact rear! Wyatt, I’m in trouble!”

  “Copy.”

  More laser fire streaked past her, the snap of ionizing air causing the hair on her neck to stand on end. Laramie had a better angle on the enemies coming up behind her, so she pivoted in her crouch and took some shots. She missed, but two of them dropped to the catwalk. A third one now appeared to hug the side of the cargo container. A moment later he raised a weapon and fired.

  More blasts burned the air. Laramie found herself in the worst possible place, caught in the crossfire between two enemy elements with limited cover. Steadying her breathing, Laramie aimed her Vector at the standing silhouette. She couldn’t miss this next shot.

  A loud hiss squealed nearby from a severed hydraulic line.

  The catwalk shuddered and disrupted Laramie’s aim. She suddenly realized that the cargo container next to her was sliding out of its mount. Horror filled her as another hydraulic line broke free and whipped around the air in a frenzied dance. With no remaining pressure to hold the mounting clamp shut, the cargo container lurched over the scaffolding and smashed into a support pole.

  Crack.

  The catwalk dropped a full meter. Laramie found herself momentarily airborne and grabbed at the stair handhold. But the walkway continued to bend away until the end poked out past the electromagnetic aeroshell.

  The wind ripped off the remaining struts in a catastrophic snap. The catwalk turned sideways.

  Laramie almost managed a scream before her hands slipped off the railing.

  13

  The catwalk twisted in a slow motion, surrounding Laramie in a vortex of screeching metal as she tumbled through the air. She saw the blue of the sky. The muddy river water far below. A cement pylon that held the maglev track, zooming by at high speed. Her mind raced to catch up with the fact that she was about to die.

  A sudden jerk jarred her insides. Her hands reflexively clutched at the air around her and closed around something soft.

  The strap on her Vector.

  Somehow it had tangled around the stair hanger. She was dangling by the proverbial thread over a thirty-meter fall at high speed.

  A terrible desperation seized her. Laramie couldn’t tell if she was breathing or screaming as she tried to pull herself back onto the tilted catwalk. All she knew was the train’s momentum was too much, that her feet were dangerously close to the edge of the aeroshell and she would soon be sucked away to oblivion.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw one of the enemy figures rushing up part of the remaining scaffold. The unmistakable shape of a Vector filled his hands.

  They were coming to finish her off.

  Wyatt, where are you?

  It was too late. A ripping sound signaled her strap failing. Laramie felt herself slipping into the torrent of rushing air, her mind filled with the last panic of her life.

  Something grabbed her wrist.

  Laramie twisted in the vise grip, wondering why she wasn’t falling into the vacuum rushing by at her feet.

  Her eyes turned to the train. A figure wearing a CORE helmet hulked over her, one hand locked on a metal strut and the other on her arm. And he was trying to pull her aboard.

  Survival instincts kicked in. Laramie grasped at the figure and managed to get her other hand wrapped around his sleeve. Together they strained to lever her up, her feet bicycling toward anything that might provide a chance foothold. Her mind noted pieces of the picture that didn’t seem quite right: the jet-black helmet, the green tattoos on sunburned forearms. A thread of danger wove its way through her mind as it tried to find a way past the immediacy of a lethal fall.

  Her toes caught the edge of a torn pipe. Pushing with all her ability, Laramie managed to haul herself closer to the scaffold until her chest flopped over the top. Her rescuer grabbed a fistful of her pant seat and dragged the rest of her up.

  She gasped a quick breath before she rolled away and pushed up to her knees. Across from her was a man who was not one of her teammates. He wore a mishmash of gear, some familiar, some not. A pockmarked ARC vest covered his chest, and chem mags studded the ammo pockets around his abdomen.

  Her Vector gone, Laramie’s hand went immediately to her pistol. Her P-10 was a ballistic weapon and not an official RESIT issue. But she’d carried one ever since she was fifteen to protect herself from hoppers out in the fields. The projectiles were slow and large, and she was positive it would blow away a fat chunk of someone at this range.

  The figure waved his forearm up and down in a cease-fire signal. “Friendly! Friendly!” he said, his voice muffled by the CORE helmet.

  The electric sizzle of laser blasts made Laramie duck. The two other figures accompanying her rescuer were still shooting at the original targets further up the train.

  A spray of slag rained down from the vaporized skin of a cargo container.

  The man wearing the black helmet crouched low and turned toward the front. He seemed to be studying the tactical situation. Then he unclipped the L-4 from his harness and held it out to Laramie.

  He gave her the hand signal for covering fire and pointed at the enemy.

  This is crazy, Laramie thought. I don’t know who these people are.

  A vague voice shouted her name. With a start, Laramie realized her earpiece had fallen out during her trapeze act. She groped across her shoulder until her fingers touched the transmitter and slipped the clip back over her earlobe.

  “—copy? Laramie, where the hell are you?”

  “Wyatt! I’m okay. I fell, but—I’m okay.”

  “We can’t get to you, Laramie. Trying to flank right, but hostiles are manning prepared positions.”

  She looked at the man who had pulled her back aboard the train. The eyeless glare of a black CORE helmet stared back at her.

  Laramie made her choice.

  “Wyatt, lay down suppressing fire. We might be able to flank from this side.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Good question for later, LT.”

  She leaned forward into a firing position and began snapping the Vector at the shadowy figures behind what she could now see were reinforced gun nests. Her shots joined the barrage from her new companions. Combat rebreathers masked all of their faces. One of them was painted yellow, like the kind firefighters wore.

  Who were these guys?

  The man with the black helmet crouched low and crawled on the catwalk. Laramie kept her attention on the enemy contacts. When she exhausted the chem mag and stopped to reload, her rescuer had moved to within five meters of the nest. Laramie watched as he primed a grenade and tossed it.

  A flash from inside the nest was followed a split second later by a sharp boom.

  Several moments passed. No more return fire came their way.

  Laramie stopped shooting. The man with the black helmet crawled to the edge of what looked like a low wall of cinderblocks and peeked over the top. He gave her the thumbs up and waved them forward.

  Gunfire still crackled intermittently on the comm. Wyatt and the others were still engaged, and RESIT didn’t have frag grenades. Laramie shifted into a crouch and hurried up to the man in the black helmet. Before she could reach him, he took off up the catwalk and disappeared around the far end of the next cargo container.

  “Wait—” she called after him.

  Footsteps tromped on the metal grate behind her. Laramie wheeled around to find another one of her new allies hurrying up the catwalk, leaving his companion behind to cover the cross platform. He ran past with nothing more than a quick glance at her. Laramie caught a glimpse of the word RESCUE stenciled on side of his yellow CORE helmet.

  “Well, that’s the truth,” she muttered.

  She went after him.

  The second man was shorter than the one who had pulled her back to safety. He took a firing position near the edge of the next cargo container by the time Laramie caught up. When he didn’t fire, Laramie dared to peek around the corner.

  Another gun nest sat on the far
side of the platform. Wyatt’s side.

  Laramie saw a cloud of smoke from Vector exhaust hanging above the nest. The black-helmeted stranger was crawling along the grating. He would be exposed to fire if the hostiles turned his way. But so far, they were apparently too busy shooting at Wyatt and his squad on the other side.

  Her rescuer readied another grenade.

  “Wyatt, fire in the hole!” Laramie said, just loud enough for the comm.

  The lieutenant would know better than to question a direct warning. The snaps of laser fire lessened as the troopers closest to the cinderblocks put their heads down.

  The grenade sailed through the air and exploded just as it passed over the nest. Another flash, another delayed boom that announced a heat wave immediately after.

  Laramie realized the thrower had cooked the grenade a few seconds before throwing it so that it would explode in the air over the nest. He knew what he was doing.

  Sporadic Vector fire from the RESIT troopers continued for a few seconds before finally stopping.

  “I think you’re clear,” Laramie said into the comm.

  “What was that? A grenade?”

  “Yes. I have some new ... friendlies with me. One of them is scouting the gun nest in front of you. Do not fire, I repeat, do not fire.”

  “Roger.”

  Laramie glanced at the man next to her. He too wore a hodgepodge of unmatched gear in addition to the yellow Fire & Rescue helmet. Whereas Laramie’s vest had insignia patches on the shoulder and back, his were bare. Some sort of radio transmitter was strapped awkwardly to his harness.

  “Coming up behind,” her earpiece said.

  Carlos appeared on the platform, stepping carefully around the remnants of the broken catwalk. He swept the area for threats through the scope of his Vector. When he spied the man next to Laramie, Carlos froze.

  This ought to be interesting, Laramie thought.

  14

  Train

  Juliet, Alpha Centauri A

  22 February 2272

  “Okay, that’s who we are,” Wyatt said. “Your turn to talk. I get that you’re sabotaging supply trains. I’m not clear on who you are, or why. Help me out.”

  They had all crammed inside the train control room, a leftover vestige from before Julietan law allowed for full computer control. Laramie stood next to Wyatt, ready more than anyone for some explanation.

  The man with the arm tattoos sat casually on the pilot chair and rested his helmet on his lap. He had brown hair and green eyes, with a scruff of beard that crawled down to his neck. His companions stood against the wall and rested their arms on their weapons. The forty kilos of military explosives the strangers had with them remained out on the scaffold under the guard of the remaining squad.

  He kept glancing at Laramie with a trace of a smirk, perhaps proud of himself for saving her. It made her dislike him. Not that she wasn’t grateful, but it almost felt like he was rubbing her nose in it.

  “Happy to cover whatever you want, Lieutenant.” The man glanced casually at the master display. “I’ll point out, though, we’ve got about twenty minutes before we’re in visual range of the city. You said you planned to infiltrate Venice onboard our train here, but take my advice. We don’t want to be on it by then.”

  “Then talk fast.”

  The man shrugged. “Okay. I’ll start with me. Master Sergeant Chris Thompson, U.S. Marine Corps—formerly. Those are Finn and Sid over there. Alonso is outside with our supply of boom. All former Marines. I used to run the security team for Governor Hewitt and his family here on Juliet. Now, I guess we’re rebels.”

  “What’s with the explosives?”

  “We were going to destroy the train.”

  “Why?”

  “Yakki Mining sends raw material to Venice to manufacture weapons and ammo. We’ve been putting the brakes on that. We have a couple aerobikes that can match the train speed when it takes the bends in the track, so that’s usually where we try to board and wire everything up. Guess the guards were a response to our past success.” A sour look crossed Chris’s face. “Hewitt’s been on a wild tear arming up since he declared martial law. This will be the first train to get through in over a month.”

  “Martial law—” Laramie said. What was he talking about? She couldn’t quite get her head around who these guys were, or why they were doing what they did. “What’s going on here?”

  Chris turned to her. “A lot of kooky stuff.”

  She frowned. The Marine watched her reaction with interest.

  “Explain,” Wyatt said.

  “There’s been a big ... epidemic of something. Lots of people getting sick, falling into comas, then waking up ... different. Empty. Kind of like you’d picture a zombie, I guess. Lots of shambling. Very contagious. Very out of control. Governor Hewitt used that as his basis for martial law.”

  The revelation hit her hard. Laramie turned and met Wyatt’s eyes. She could tell he was thinking the same thing. Parrell.

  “How far has it spread?”

  “I don’t know. General McManus is Hewitt’s Secretary of Security. He put a bunch of districts under quarantine. Parts of Venice are secure, other parts are wastelands filled with infected people.” He chuckled. “Some are just filled with looters and criminals. You can tell the difference if someone’s shooting at you.”

  Laramie felt her eyes narrowing. “Is this a joke to you?”

  “No, no joke. I don’t think it’s funny when your family or friends change into an empty shell. I’m just providing practical advice. You know, so you know whether to run, or duck.”

  Wyatt brought the conversation back on topic. “So, why are you rebels, Chris?”

  The Marine seemed to be considering how much to tell them. He spoke carefully. “How would you picture a quarantine working, Lieutenant?”

  “We do this in RESIT sometimes,” he said. “You focus on containment so the disease won’t spread. Block entrance and egress to an infected area. Deliver humanitarian effort to ease suffering until a treatment can be administered.”

  A dark smile spread over Chris’s face. “Yeah. McManus decided that quarantine meant something a little more aggressive.”

  “Such as?”

  “Proactive extermination.”

  Laramie wasn’t sure she heard right. “What?”

  He turned toward her again. “Death squads go in and cull anyone they think is infected. A lot of times, the immediate family tries to stop them. Right? You’re not going to let the police kill mom or dad, are you? So, they get waxed too. All in the name of containing a virulent disease. The police have wiped out entire sections of the city.”

  “That can’t be right,” Wyatt said.

  “Wait.” Laramie’s brain was racing to catch up. This was insane. It had to be bad information. “You’re telling us that the whole Julietan government is complicit in mass murder? That’s unbelievable. I served under General Hu when I was in the Army. He’d never let that happen.”

  “Hu’s dead.”

  For the first time in ages, Laramie was at a loss for words.

  “What happened?” Wyatt asked.

  “A coup attempt. Hu, by the way, was the Security Undersecretary. He worked for McManus.” Chris’s eyes moved to Laramie again. “You’re right about Hu. Things were getting crazy really quickly. To his credit, Hu tried to stop it. It ... didn’t work out.”

  Laramie’s mind was spinning out of control. “My God.”

  Chris looked at her again. She realized he was eyeing her figure—heavy muscles from a heavy planet. “You’re from here, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where?”

  “West Hadensville.”

  “I don’t know where that is.” Chris fingered his beard some more. “Maybe that’s a good thing.”

  Wyatt seemed to be deep in thought. “I assume McManus took over command of RESIT Dagger?”

  “What do you mean? I thought you were RESIT.”

  “We’re
Caustic Team. On station around Proxima.”

  “Proxima?” The master sergeant seemed confused.

  “We came through the quantum gate,” Wyatt said. “We were intercepted by Dagger, the RESIT team that handles this system. Their attack craft didn’t follow any standard protocol. They butchered the crew of one freighter and opened fire on us.”

  Chris shrugged. “You’re asking if McManus is behind that as well? Maybe. But honestly, I think most of his attention is down here on the ground.” He thought for a moment. “Why are you here, anyway? Aren’t you, like, deep-space rescue and stuff?”

  “We do more than that,” Laramie said. Her pride bristled. She wasn’t going to take a put-down from some ground-pounder.

  Wyatt held up a hand to settle her. “We do a lot of direct-action raids, Chris. Proxima has what you might call a piracy problem.”

  “Huh.”

  A repeating chime sounded from the control panel. Laramie felt her bodyweight shift forward as the train started a gradual deceleration.

  “Time’s getting short, Lieutenant,” Chris said.

  “Yeah, it is,” Wyatt said. “We’re about to get off this train and I’m still missing how you went from personal security to hardcore insurgent. You said you were part of the governor’s security detail. Why aren’t you with him, with all this going on?”

  Laramie watched as the master sergeant’s demeanor changed. A hardness entered his eyes. “I have a problem with murder. You can justify it any way you want—that the infected are going to die anyway, that they could spread whatever it is to another person. You can say you’re euthanizing them for their own good. They’re still people. They didn’t do anything wrong. So when you round them all up for industrial slaughter, that’s murder.” Chris spied a stray thread on one of his gloves and started to pick at it. “The governor and his people didn’t see things my way, so I left. Unfortunately, he’s doing everything he can to find and kill me.”

  “Because you blow up his supply trains?” Laramie asked.