“Paul Grimm grew up in the mines on Hardisty,” she told him. “You?”
“Twenty-five years under cold stone,” he said, his chest puffing out just a little. “Soon as I was old enough for my shares to vest, I sold them to my sister and went off looking for adventure.” His eyes drifted over to the two prisoners.
“You’d know, then,” he said mildly, still looking at the two men, “what a proper guildsman miner would do with the likes of these two.”
Julia sighed. She now had two prisoners and a refugee to worry about and Banksy had very clear ideas regarding one of her problems. She turned to the men guarding the captives but her attention was diverted as the young man they’d rescued walked over to one of the prisoners. The lad grabbed a medium-sized stone and calmly bashed it into the side of the man’s head.
His victim had looked just as terrified at this new assault as he’d been when trying to shoot himself, but he still didn’t raise his hands in defense. His comrade, however, scuttled away from the grisly execution.
The youngster hammered the head once more as the body was falling over to the side and then gave him several more solid hits to the temple for good measure, stopping only after the sound of breaking bone was clearly heard.
He stepped back from the twitching body and tossed the stone on its chest.
“A good lad, that one,” Banksy muttered. “Avenged by stone from his father’s grave. Think I’ll foster him – show him the ropes in engineering.” He looked over at Julia. “Unless you object to a new body on board?”
She tore her eyes away from the blood-spattered lad. “Yeah… no problem, Banksy, as long as Chief Savage has no objections. Just make sure he understands we’re his friends, right?”
She walked over to the second man, whose eyes were riveted to the young miner. “You,” she snapped, waiting for his gaze to dart her way, “why are your crewmates all so eager to kill themselves rather than face capture and, more to the point, what makes you different?”
“I dunno, luv. I swear it…”
“Call me ‘luv’ again and I’ll snap one of your legs like a wishbone.”
He held his hands out, palms facing her. “Sorry, l…” A little headshake. “Sorry. No offense meant, just a figure of speech where I come from.” He waved at his dead crewmate. “Don’t know these lads very well. They fished me out of an escape pod after my ship got into an ill-advised fight with a surprisingly well escorted Gray cruiser.”
“They were in the same fight?”
He shook his head. “They just showed up an hour later. Scavenged what they could from the Raleigh and picked me up, more as an afterthought, really, on their way back out of the debris field.”
“How long were you with the Walter Currie?”
“Two weeks, give or take.”
“Did they seem strange to you?”
“Strange?” He laughed. “Is a bear polytheist? Does the Archbishop shit in the forest?” He screwed up his face. “Blind me! I’ve lost more blood than I thought. I’m starting to lose my grip.”
He shook his head vigorously. “Strange? I figured they were all just cold fish, but then they started murdering everyone down here. I mean, we usually raid places like this, but we nab what we can use, destroy the rest and leave them to pick up the pieces.”
This time the head shake was slow, almost in denial. “We just try to slow down the other side’s economy, right? But this…”
“Animals,” Banksy growled. “Inhuman pieces of garbage. Killing civilians, and children, no less…”
“Well that’s it, isn’t it?” The man looked up at Banksy, his head tilted to the right. “They looked like they were horrified at what they were doing, but their bodies went ahead and did it anyway.”
“Get him back to the Ava Klum,” Julia ordered. “Have doc look at him and then put him in the brig. And, Banksy…” She put a hand on his shoulder to turn him back. “Keep a hood on him.”
She didn’t want an enemy learning anything about her forces, especially the fact that she had a Gray cruiser for her flagship.
Divide & Conquer
Paul moved back from the upper-level window. Two Marines, right on schedule, heading for their usual check-in. They were good at taking different routes but their destination never changed.
And their timing was an example of military precision. Not a good habit if you’re on an irregular operation.
Now Paul only had three Marines to face.
They worried him. Gilbert and his crew had been easy pickings, but they were civilians and they didn’t have his niece as a hostage. The three Marines in the abandoned warehouse across the street were a different game entirely. They would have the standard Corps augments and they were battle hardened. A stun ball would have no effect on them.
He also had flimsy intel on their dispositions. He knew one man stood sentry just inside the door of the structure, but that left two of them to locate and neutralize before they could harm Saoirse.
The Corps might refer to this as a meeting engagement, which happens when an intelligence failure brings a mobile unit into unexpected contact with an enemy force. At least he was expecting the encounter.
The key to winning the meeting engagement is always mobility and initiative. All he could do was take out the first man as quickly as possible and try to roll up his enemies’ flank.
He took a deep breath. No better solution had presented itself. He could call in the local law enforcement, but the justices were poorly suited to hostage rescue in general and they’d be worse than useless against Imperial Marines.
Anyway, he was a justice, and the only one with a ghost of a chance at succeeding, so… He gave a friendly nod to the three men who he’d tied up while using their lair as an observation post. …time to take the initiative away from his enemy.
Leaving his hosts tied up, he descended the stairs and crossed the street. He dropped a fighting knife from a forearm-sheath, catching it in the fingers of his right hand and rotating it to a reverse grip. He kept his pace to a walk until he reached the door and hauled it open with his left hand.
He took a wide step to the right, bringing the knife around in a backhanded swing into the temple of the startled Marine. It stuck there and he left it, drawing his Nuttall Special as he walked up the stairs.
At this point, he still had stealth on his side. He didn’t want to blow it by running. Footsteps hammering through the building indicated an attack. There was a difference between speed and haste. His instructors on Beaufort had hammered that into his skull.
Speed didn’t necessarily mean racing ahead without thought. It meant making decisions and acting on them without unnecessary delay.
Down the hall in a room to the right, his augmented senses could detect a single heartbeat and micro-servo motors. One Marine heading for the door to the hallway. Paul assessed the time it would take for the man’s face to protrude the optimal distance into the hallway and accelerated to a jog.
He shifted the pistol to his left hand and drew it across his chest. The door opened and a young man stepped out, turning in surprise as the footfalls drew his attention.
Paul brought the weapon around in a vicious backhand, smashing the man’s mouth and dropping him to the floor like a sack of bones.
He’d detected two more heartbeats behind a door at the end of the hallway. One set of micro-servos.
He accelerated to full speed and slammed through the aluminium foam door, bringing his weapon up to aim at the location of the last Marine. The man was shocked, and Paul took an extra micro-day to settle his aim. He put a three-round burst into the center of mass and followed up with another to his head, just on the off-chance he’d been wearing a ballistic undershirt.
The man was already on his way down before the three rounds hit him in the face, and Paul turned his attention to the second heartbeat in the room.
She was sitting on an old couch, some sheets and a pillow showing it doubled as her bed. A bottle of water lay at h
er feet, where she’d dropped it in surprise. A trickle of water pooled in front of five suits of Heavy Marine Armor.
She had that same look of surprised disbelief his mother would get when he and Ava used to jump, screaming, out of her closet and knock a few years off her lifespan.
“Saoirse,” he said urgently, “we need to get you out of here before the other two come back.” He cursed himself for a fool. Who expects a young girl to simply trust the man who’s just killed someone in front of her? Sure, the dead man was her captor but, still, who was he?
“I’m your uncle Paul. Your mother sent me to find you.”
Her expression changed quickly. Most people out here had seen the execution of Claudius Seneca, but they were looking at Seneca, not Paul. Only someone with a family tie would notice the man who’d killed the Grand Senator.
She stood, tilting to the left, a manacle leading down to the frame of the couch. “Uncle Paul? What are you doing here?”
“That’s several long stories,” he told her as he kneeled by the dead man. “He has the keys?”
“Umm…” She squinted at the body. “Right chest pocket, I think.”
Paul rolled him over and patted the front of the shirt. “Not there.” He felt the man’s dog-tags and pulled them out from under the shirt. The key was there, along with the data chips that identified him. He unlocked her manacle and grasped her shoulders gently.
“Are you OK?” he asked.
A nod. “Aside from keeping me chained to that couch for weeks on end, yeah, I’m fine.” She raised an eyebrow at him. “If you’re really my uncle, how did you break your nose?”
He grinned. “Atta girl! Always verify. Your mom broke it when she dropped a stone down a mineshaft and hit me in the face.”
She threw her arms around him and the effect took Paul completely by surprise. Aside from recently meeting Ava, the last time he’d gotten a hug from family, it had been from her mother and she’d been close to the same age Saoirse was now.
It almost made him forget the urgency of their situation but he heard footsteps pounding up the stairs.
His two remaining Marine opponents had returned, perhaps picking up a short-range distress call from their comrade guarding Saoirse. His augmented senses would have picked up Paul’s fight in the hallway and he might have had time to call his men back.
The two men were making the mistake of assuming they held all the advantages. A civilian, standing where Paul was, wouldn’t be able to hear their approach until they were in the hallway. Someone who’d kept their Marine Corps implants and gone on to receive a whole suite of expensive additional augments, would hear them first.
He stepped over to the door and fired three shots down the hall to keep their heads down. Taking on three of them with the element of surprise was one thing – facing two Marines in a fair fight was quite another.
Fair fights fill graveyards.
He cursed. There was no other way out of this room. He turned back to see his niece take cover behind the short row of armor and supressed another curse. His implants could emulate the signal from an IFF transponder. It would let him operate HMA but he still couldn’t protect her if his opponents had enough sense to separate and come at them from more than one direction.
And the HMA suit, calibrated for another man, would operate like an enraged bull.
In Paul’s defense, most of his time in the Corps had been as a military cop. If he’d had much experience in high-intensity conflict, he’d have come up with it much sooner.
“Platoon flow,” he hissed.
“Saoirse!” he yelled, waving a hand at the armor. “Get in one of those suits. Step in backwards and stand still with your arms straight out to the sides.”
He waved again. “Quick!” He fired another burst down the hall before running over to join her.
She was just putting the second foot in. “I don’t think this stuff works for a civilian from what I’ve… Oh!”
The suit folded around her with alarming speed, closing all the way to her waist. A panel, usually used as part of the heads-up display, was angled toward Paul.
It was the standard response for HMA when activated by anyone other than the calibrated user. It allowed non-combat use for any number of reasons, ranging from the evac of a wounded comrade whose own suit was too damaged to the extraction of civilians in a hostage situation.
As long as a Marine with an authentic IFF code set the command, the suit would carry just about anyone. Paul selected VIP Extraction and closed her up.
“Weapons hold,” he ordered. He didn’t want her suit auto-firing at anything that looked hostile, but he did want it able to return fire. He backed into one of the other suits and stood still while it snapped shut around him.
This might just work.
He didn’t have time to check the systems, not when it would give his opponents time to enter the room and suit up. He pulled the 17mm sidearm from a notch in his suit’s leg and moved to stand in front of the three remaining suits. Saoirse’s suit moved to his left flank automatically.
He brought up the weapon and took aim at the spine shaft where the first empty suit’s main CPU was housed. He fired a two round burst from the heavy pistol and was rewarded with two large holes in the wall instead.
High and to the right. He corrected his aim manually, positioning the reticle in his HUD low and to the left. He fired two more shots and was rewarded with a single strike to the CPU casing. “Target adjust,” he ordered. He switched aim to the next suit, confident the sound of the heavy pistol would convince his enemies to exercise caution.
He aimed the reticle directly at the target and the adjustment was close enough for him to put his first salvo directly into the CPU housing.
He finished off the third suit before opening a channel to his niece. “Ready to go home?” he asked her lightly.
“Umm… yes, but what do I need to do?”
“Just relax and enjoy the ride. Your suit will follow me automatically, select tactical positions as needed and return fire on anyone who tries to shoot at us.
He led the way out into the hallway, which seemed a lot smaller, now that he was seeing it through the HMA sensor suite. He could see two heat signatures moving back down the stairs to wait at the landing.
He reached the top of the stairs and looked down at the two men.
There was no contest. His armor and heavy caliber weapon made a mockery of their soft skin and 3mm pistols so they simply tossed them on the floor.
Paul waved the heavy weapon at them. “You used to be Marines,” he growled. “Look at you now, threatening young girls for money! And you were the terrorists at the Gliese system, weren’t you?”
They at least possessed the grace to look ashamed.
“We were following orders,” the man on the left said, looking up from the landing.
“Following orders to kill Imperial citizens?” Paul demanded harshly. “You had to know it was an illegal order.” He waved a hand at the suit containing Saoirse. “And who gave you orders to hold her hostage? It wasn’t CentCom and it certainly couldn’t have been Seneca because I killed him myself.”
Their eyes grew wide. “You’re Grimm?” Their faces began showing traces of anger.
“Yes, I am, and I can see you’re thinking I’m the one who ruined your scheme out on the Rim, but maybe you should be looking at it from another perspective.” He lowered his weapon. “Maybe I’m the one who freed you from your dishonor.”
He saw some uncertainty in their eyes and it was enough for him to let them live. He started down the stairs and they shrank back into the corners to give the two suits room.
He headed straight toward the commercial district where he’d drunk so much coffee earlier. He stopped halfway there and opened a channel. He’d forgotten, in the after-haze of his adrenaline rush, that HMA suits had powerful transmitters. He didn’t need to reach the commercial zone to contact his sister’s people. He requested a shuttle rendezvous at one of sever
al pre-arranged locations and closed the channel.
He started jogging in the direction of the commercial zone, which lay near the landing site.
“Do we have to run?” Saoirse complained. “My legs are killing me!”
“Don’t fight the suit,” he advised. “Just go limp and let the HMA do the work. If you try to move voluntary muscles when the suit’s on platoon flow, you’ll be sore for weeks.”
He slowed to a walk as they reached the denser pedestrian flow, even though everyone got out of the way as quickly as possible. They strolled through a cordon of amazed citizens who’d never seen combat armor before.
Paul’s path to the rendezvous led straight down the main pedway, but he turned off to the right and continued on through three intersections to find the coffee shop he’d been sitting at earlier.
The owner of the small establishment had come out to see what the fuss was about and he stopped in shock when he saw the two heavy suits emblazoned with the fouled docking-clamp of the Imperial Marines.
Paul’s helmet retracted out of sight with startling speed and Saoirse’s, set to follow the leader, did likewise. The upper body armor retracted almost as quickly, freeing their hands.
“Hi, Tommy,” Paul greeted the barista cheerfully. “I’ll have a double shot of Imperiano – no crema.”
“Make that two, please,” Saoirse added with a mischievous smile.
Perhaps glad to do something that made sense, the man shrugged and dove back into the little corner where he kept his beans and grinders. This was probably going to be good for his business. Tommy’s Coffee – the shop of choice among the Imperial Marines!
Paul looked over at his niece, the first time he’d taken the time to really see her. She looked so much like her mother on the last day he’d seen her in the Imperium. “Does your mother know you drink coffee?”
She grinned back. “Does she know you’re taking me on a detour to buy coffee?”
Paul needed a shot to sort his brain out. The post-adrenaline haze was fogging his mind. Still, he was her uncle, not her father. “Fair enough.”
Beyond the Rim (Rebels and Patriots Book 2) Page 15
