She stood as the extra charge packets slid in behind the first projectile and aimed down at the top glass. She took two quick steps forward to get a straighter angle on the heavy transparent panel that roofed the walkway and squeezed the trigger.
The weapons team would just have to catch up as best they could.
The rounds punched through and spread a spider-web of cracks across the whole panel but it steadfastly refused to break. She cursed and stepped forward to aim at the next panel but one of the enemy crewmen, caught up in the violent exhaust of air through the holes, was pulled up to slam against the glazing.
She turned, feeling the impact through her feet rather than hearing it, and leaned back in alarm as the panel and body exploded upward along with a flurry of clipboards, tablets and other bodies as the air rushed out of both the ship and the station. The flow quickly abated as the station portal sensed the decompression and sealed itself.
Julia stepped into the open hole and dropped down to the walkway’s grav plating. She finished off the remaining enemy, more out of mercy than anything. If she was dying from sudden decompression, she’d certainly be grateful for a bullet.
She moved quickly down the walkway to the boarding portal and stopped to kick out the last glass panel to give Grocholski a faster way in. She stepped into the main portside companionway and, unsurprisingly, found nobody ready to bounce shots off her armor in the unpressurized corridor.
As always, her nerves were settling now that the fight had started. Her attention could focus on what needed to be done, rather than what might go horribly wrong. She led her team aft, knowing the bridge was located atop the superstructure above the engines.
They reached the first bulkhead and she motioned her team to the sides while their technician yanked open a panel and retracted the emergency pins holding the portal in place.
With a nod, he backed up against the panel.
Julia bent her knees and grabbed a ridge on the portal with armored fingers and heaved the thick panel up. Another windstorm whirled past her feet. A body, still clutching a weapon, glanced off her left foot and slid twenty meters down the companionway, the pistol skittering out of his nerveless grasp as he slowed to halt.
She shoved the door all the way up and waited until her team had all passed through before stepping in and letting the heavy panel drop back down.
Again, she took the lead, putting her heavy armor out front to protect her more vulnerable crew members. She strode to the next intersection and turned inboard to head for the main bridge lift but stopped at the sight of a projected officer.
She cycled through the active signals until finding a transmission whose modulation matched the movement of the ghostly lips in front of her. She routed it to her helmet speakers and cut off the enemy officer in mid-sentence. “Just picking up your signal now,” she told him. “Say again.”
The holo image raised his hands, palm outward. “We don’t want any trouble with Imperial Marines,” he declared. “We’ve got the sense to know when we’re outmatched. Just tell us what you want.”
Julia shouldn’t have been surprised, but she’d mostly thought of her heavy Marine armor suit in terms of how it could be used to minimize friendly casualties, not about how it would be viewed by an enemy.
The suit was unmistakably HMA and they wouldn’t operate unless the user had the right Marine implants. You couldn’t just buy one on the black market and take it into battle. The presence of an HMA suit meant the presence of an Imperial Marine.
In a region with no professional military, the Imperial Marines were accorded an almost mythological status. The entertainment industry out here made at least as many holos about them as their counterparts back in the Imperium.
It was the kind of advantage she could only use a few times before word got around. Once it became common knowledge that a single Marine was leading her small but growing fleet, folks wouldn’t be so easily intimidated.
For now, all that mattered was that she would take this ship without any more casualties.
“Surrender your vessel,” she demanded. “You’ll have to suit up to leave the ship but I want you all off within ten milli-days.”
The holo nodded. “Frankly, I’m relieved to see you here,” he told her, his voice sad, almost resigned. “I was never comfortable working with them.” His face twitched.
“Working with who?” she asked.
“Screw it,” he replied defiantly, though it was unclear just who the defiance was directed against. “It was probably just a bullshit attempt to scare us. We…” His eyes widened in surprise. “We…” He shook his head slightly, his eyes no longer focusing on Julia.
The enemy officer seemed to be trying to speak but he appeared to be locked in some sort of internal struggle, his face a battleground of emotions. His mouth opened only to snap shut again. Fear won control of his face and he pulled his sidearm from its hip holster.
Despite knowing he was a holographic projection, Julia instinctively flinched and raised her own weapon a few degrees.
The fear gave way to pleading as he shook his head. He brought the pistol up to his temple and blew his own brains out. The holographic figure slumped to the floor, leaving an empty projection haze in front of Julia and her team.
“Tell me I’m not the only one that found that a little disturbing,” Robin muttered.
“Let’s get up there as fast as we can.” Julia jogged over to the bridge lift and pushed up into the grav-free shaft. She pulled her way up the side rungs left handed, the weapon still in her right.
Along the way, she heard the three clicks on their emergency channel that announced the weapons team had boarded the ship. They’d agreed to use comms only if separated. It wasn’t as if the enemy were unaware of their presence now, but that didn’t mean they were going to start giving them any hints.
When she poked her head above the level of the bridge deck, a patter of small arms fire bounced off her armored head. She slid the muzzle of her assault rifle over the edge and returned fire, taking down three of the resisting crew. A fourth dropped his weapon, perhaps recognizing the folly of trading fire with a heavily armored opponent.
She pulled herself up the shaft until slightly higher than the deck and pushed out a foot. It sank to the floor with a clang and she used it as an anchor to pull the rest of her body into the grav-zone of the bridge deck.
She crouched and brought her weapon up but, again, the instinctual response was unnecessary. The enemy crewman had drawn his sidearm but he was bringing it up to his head, his face reflecting his terror.
Julia took aim and fired a three-round burst, hoping to sever or disable the man’s arm but he fired just before she could. He slumped to the deck in a grisly pool.
She rushed to the main bridge portal, slapping her weapon to the mag plate on her back as she moved. She grabbed the center of the heavy doors and heaved them open.
She saw no movement inside, but she drew her Wachter Caseless 17mm from a hip holster and moved to her left, ready to fire at anything suspicious.
The whole thing was so surreal. She found the first body at the navigation panel. Shot in the head at point-blank range. Why was the crew committing suicide? She risked a quick glance at her weapon, seeing only one red dot raised beneath the sights. She didn’t want to risk anything more than a single propellant disk per shot if it came to a gunfight in here.
Theoretically, you could select any muzzle velocity you wanted from the WC-17 but, at some point, you’d have so many discs loaded you’d burst the breech and kill yourself. And speaking of killing yourself…
Why was everyone killing themselves? They certainly didn’t look like they wanted to.
The rest of her team were clearing their own designated stations and it looked like none of the original crew were left alive up here.
“There’s something wrong with this ship,” one of the helmsmen muttered.
“Henson,” Julia reproved him mildly, “you’ll frighten us girls!”
That broke the tension. The rest of the bridge crew were laughing at Henson, who had the good grace not to take offense at the joke. He grinned ruefully.
“There’s nothing wrong with the ship,” Julia insisted, “but there’s sure as hell something wrong with its original crew.”
She turned to one of the stations. “Zeiss, button us down. All our people are inside now. Robin…” Julia turned again. “Get the coordinates into the nav computer. I want us jumping the instant Grouch can spool up the drive and release the clamps.”
Zeiss looked up from his station, frowning slightly. “All outer hatches sealed, Captain, but what if any original crew are willing to leave the ship?”
She waved a hand, drawing his gaze to the dead officer of the watch at her feet. “I have a feeling we aren’t going to have any prisoners willing to go dirtside. If we manage to find anyone with their head intact, I’d rather hang onto them for the time being. Something weird is going on here and I’d be an idiot if I didn’t look into it.”
She held up a hand as a series of clicks sounded in her helmet, but they made no sense. She sighed. “Grouch, just use voice comms; we have the ship now and I can’t make heads or tails of your last transmission.”
“Fine by me,” Grocholski muttered. “All those damn clicks… might as well be using bird calls or something...”
“Did you have something to report?” Julia cut in.
“Sure do,” he answered. “Drive is spooled and we’re ready to blow the clips on the main clamps but, Captain, we’ve got something strange going on down here.”
“You trying to tell me the enemy are shooting themselves in the head once it becomes clear they’re going to lose?”
“Umm, I take it you’re seeing the same thing?”
“We are. Did you take anybody alive down there, Grouch?”
“Not a single one,” he told her. “It’s like they all have a built-in self-destruct.”
“Secure your department and carry on with clearing your assigned decks,” she ordered.
“Helm is ready to jump,” Robin announced.
“Grouch, blow the clamps – we’re getting out of here.” Julia flexed her shoulder muscles, shedding stress while she waited for confirmation.
“Clamps retracting.”
“Helm, push back.”
“Push back, aye, ma’am.” Robin repeated the order as she worked the controls. “Reading clear of obstruction. The enemy facility is outside of our distortion effect envelope.”
“Very well,” Julia nodded. “Initiate.”
Picking up the Trail
Paul began by mapping the edges of the warehousing district’s sensor dead-zone. He added in every unidentified signal entering and leaving the zone on the day in question but he couldn’t find any patterns.
He’d hoped to find five similar but unidentifiable signals but there was nothing. His sigh of frustration was lost in the roar of a heavy cargo lifter as it came down on a nearby pad. He had walked away from Gilbert’s hideout until he’d reached a reputable area of the warehousing district where he could connect to the data-net.
As it turned out, he hadn’t needed to go far.
He frowned suddenly. Perhaps the small group of Marines hadn’t gone far either. The dead zone was an ideal place to be if you wanted to hide.
He nodded to himself.
Especially if you were trying to hide a citizen with a broadcasting chip in her arm.
He was looking in the right place – the edge of the dead zone – but he was also looking in the wrong time. He kept the original parameters but began pushing back the timeframe, looking for the point when five identical but unrecognized signals disappeared somewhere on the edges of the zone.
A little over three days prior to the kidnapping, he found them. He followed them back through time until the point where they deactivated their citizen chips.
Roanoke really needed to invest in chips that were harder to hack.
He brought up their files. All five were new citizens, having arrived together within the last year and their names rang no bells. Paul half watched as the facial parameters were catalogued and stored on his CPU.
He was trying to let his mind wander. He usually made crucial connections when he wasn’t trying so hard to concentrate. He was just starting to wonder how they communicated with their client from the dead zone when a row of five faces appeared on his display.
These weren’t their Roanokan citizen abstracts. These were service records from the Imperial Marine Corps.
When Paul had learned the 538 Marine Expeditionary Force was being used in a secessionist plot, he’d uploaded their unit records to determine the extent of their involvement. He still had those files, including personnel data.
The five men were from the 538. Their last known whereabouts was temporary detached duty on Irricana. As far as Paul was concerned, that meant they’d been posing as the fake secessionists.
Their plot had been unravelled several months ago, but how did they get out here so quickly, and through Gray-controlled space?
He identified one hope ship during that time period and their faces weren’t aboard it. He shrugged. It would have to remain a mystery for the time being.
He realized they’d have to come to the edge of the zone on a regular basis to check in with their paymasters. What was the point of having a hostage if you didn’t have control over the team that held her?
He found the pattern quickly. Single signals appeared in a relatively small spread on a regular basis. The Marines were varying their movements, but only barely. He treated himself to a moment of professional pride. The operators he knew from his own unit, the 488, had better sense than that.
Then again, these five may not be properly trained operators to begin with. It was very much like the deceased Claudius Seneca to ignore important distinctions like that. This may have just been a Marine fire team that had been put in a covert role and they’d somehow survived the fight at Irricana and ended up out here.
He made his way over to the area where the Marines were checking in. It was a light commercial sector, zoned to serve the needs of the district’s employees. Snack shops, bars and coffee shops were crammed into every possible space and no line of vision extended for more than twenty meters before getting cut off by a flashing sign or ramshackle, unlicensed shop.
The half of the commercial zone that extended beyond signal range boasted a decidedly less savory array of businesses. The lurid holo vids on their signs left little doubt as to what sort of transactions took place within their walls, assuming any of them were even physically possible.
Paul found a relatively non-disgusting coffee shop near the middle of the zone and settled in with a lukewarm black coffee. He’d learned, long ago, to take his coffee black when patronizing a less-than-reputable shop. Some early experiences as a military cop on one of the temporary colonies had, literally and figuratively, left a bad taste in his mouth.
He was just ordering his third coffee when he picked up a signal. He’d been on the verge of re-locating when it happened. Few enough people would want to drink even one coffee in a shop like this, but a man would have to be unhinged to sit around and soak up the ambience of dusty grease and rotting food for any longer than two cups.
“To go,” he called brusquely after the potman. He stepped over to the counter and waved a wrist to cover the bill. He took his third coffee with a polite nod and left the overhanging balcony whose cover seemed to demark the boundary of the coffee shop.
The signal was close, eighty meters to his right. He moved that way at a quick walk, not wanting to draw attention. For all he knew, the Marines from the 538 might have had the sense to send a second man to do counter-surveillance.
He slowed even more as he came within twenty meters. He matched the flow of the other pedestrians, intending to let them carry him past the signal source but it cut out when he was still ten meters away. He began angling toward the edge of the dark zone and
spotted the man almost immediately. There was no hiding the confidence in a Marine’s walk.
He moved up to get within ten meters and began picking up his transponder. The dark zone might not connect with the city, but a Marine IFF sent its own short-range signal, allowing better coordination during combat. Though Paul had kept many of his implants from his time in the Corps, he’d been glad to have his transponder removed.
The ten-meter range was a bit of a trade-off. It wouldn’t give away your position to enemies unless they were already on top of you anyway, but it gave leaders on the ground a half-decent idea where their men were and, more importantly, prevented danger-close detonation of friendly ordinance unless an override had been authorized.
He stopped to look at the food in a street shop that had a row of skinned rats hanging in the back. His stomach finally insisted they move on.
He could still see the man walking in front of him, angling toward one of the lurid signs. Paul wondered if they might be holed up inside. It seemed to be a relatively high-traffic place, so their presence was likely to go unnoticed.
He shuddered. If they were keeping his niece in that heap, he’d show them what misery really was.
He almost turned his head in surprise as another transponder passed him. The second man, also one of the five from the 538, quickened his pace to enter the establishment along with his comrade.
Paul allowed himself to relax a little. If they were staying here, the second man wouldn’t have been in such a rush to catch up. He would’ve had all the time in the world to enjoy the place. They were probably just here for a quick visit on their way back to their real hideout.
Their visit was short. Paul was still scouting around the building when they emerged together and headed deeper into the dead zone. He fell in behind them, letting the distance grow as the crowd thinned. They must have stopped just long enough to shotgun a beer before heading back to report to the sergeant who was probably still their leader.
If luck was on Paul’s side, they might have had a couple of shots of the hard stuff instead. He was about to go up against five Marines. This was nothing like Gilbert and his merry band of disposables. These were professionals and every micro-day of delayed reaction was going to be a welcome help.
Beyond the Rim (Rebels and Patriots Book 2) Page 13
