The Gray Matter (Rebels and Patriots Book 3)

by A. G. Claymore

  Paul looked across the water to where their target was walking from the dock to the abandoned building. If they started too soon, they might only get a glimpse of a few hallways. The man disappeared inside and Paul closed his eyes.

  “I’m watching his movements on an overlay of the building,” he explained. “Let’s hope the plans on file are accurate.

  “He’s moving down the hall to the main office. Hang on, he’s waiting outside the office that belonged to the plant director. The bag is on the ground; I think he’s waiting on a chair or a couch.”

  “Just tell me when,” Daffyd urged.

  “Ok, the bag is moving again. Start the video feed.” Paul opened his eyes and, once he started seeing the slightly hazy image from inside the building, he routed the data to Daffyd’s projector.

  A hallway sprang up around them. A guard opened a heavy gray door and stepped aside. A man with short-cropped hair stood just inside with a 10mm pistol in his hand. As soon as the bag reached the doorway, the image stuttered and then faded entirely.

  “Cao wo!” Paul exclaimed “What happened? Did the power fail?”

  Daffyd shook his head. “That stutter – it wasn’t the power cells; it was countermeasures. I’m sure of it.” He picked up the ball, checking to ensure that it had at least stored what they did manage to see. “Whoever that was, it wasn’t Kinsey.”

  “He’s a lieutenant from the 538.” Paul sighed. “For all we know, Kinsey is in that room right now, but that officer blocked our view.”

  “So what do we do now,” Daffyd asked, “hit the place or watch it?”

  Paul looked out across the river, chewing on the inside of his cheek. “If we set up observation posts, the only way we confirm Kinsey’s presence is if he leaves the place and then we’re back to square one again. That means the assault option.”

  “And if he isn’t in there?”

  “Then we grab whatever intel we can and move on it immediately.” Paul stood up, waiting for Daffyd to collect his projector and turn it off. He led the way up the stairs.

  “The clever chess game is over. Now for the mad scramble.”

  Approach

  “Signal coming back from the scout,” the communications officer announced.

  “I’ll take it here.” Ava activated the holo feed from the incoming signal and studied the trace sent back by one of the Hasty Ferrets they’d borrowed from the Dark Star.

  Nurazhal was a major shipbuilding node for the Gray Quorum. Located at the center of a concentration of mineral-rich planets, Nurazhal itself possessed little in the way of minerals, but it had a stable climate and the crops raised there helped feed the massive shipyard that ringed the planet.

  Its position placed it in the middle of a resource-rich sector. No doubt the Grays had run endless simulations and linear transport optimizations before deciding the planet represented the most efficient place to bring the riches of the surrounding worlds and convert them into ships.

  The Hasty Ferret, sitting far enough away from Nurazhal to be almost undetectable, was now beaming a treasure-trove of tactical data back to Ava’s flagship, which was well beyond the known detection range of Gray long-range sensing.

  The HF’s hull consisted of a network of flat facets, each one coated with a matte black material that excelled at converting electromagnetic energy into heat. Cooling systems carried that heat away to the entropy shunts, capturing and imprisoning any light or radar that might otherwise return to the Grays and give away her position.

  The Ferret crews were a pragmatic bunch and kept mostly to their own kind. One pilot and one operator were assigned to each of the small craft and they made their living sitting under the enemy’s nose. A combat shuttle sitting at the same range would be detected immediately and destroyed.

  Their sensor suite was second to none and the data flooding back to the fleet presented Ava with a tough decision. “Tactical.” She looked over to find him watching her, along with most of the bridge crew. She chuckled, expanding the view to full size, filling the open space in the center of the bridge. “Looks like half their forces are still here.”

  The tactical officer approached the other side of the projection. He nodded, lips drawn tight. “Twice our forces, at the least. Frankly, we suspected as much. We never really expected them to send everything they had for a single mining outpost.”

  He moved slowly around the projection, coming to stop next to her. “Not sure I’m keen on fighting against these odds.”

  “Nor am I,” Ava mused, and then a grin spread across her face. “But what if only half of us fight them?”

  Gloves Off

  Fate

  “Seems a shame,” Daffyd said wistfully. “I hate to damage a good ship.” He ran a hand along the smooth wood of the bridge railing. “Never even saw a ship made to float on water before. There’s something about it that just feels right. Less claustrophobic than a spaceship.”

  “You get claustrophobic?” Paul arched an eyebrow at him. “An engineer? You’ve got all those enclosed spaces to crawl through and you’re claustrophobic?”

  “That’s different. When I’m in a conduit run or climbing in behind a module, I’m there because my ship needs me. It’s… symbiotic. I keep her alive and she returns the favor. When I’m off duty, the walls start closing in.”

  “Mictlan couldn’t have been much fun for you.”

  Daffyd chuckled. “As opposed to all the other inmates who enjoy living in a supermax prison so much.”

  “Well, once things settle down, you could come back here and find another ship. Maybe make a living carrying cargo around the station?”

  “Nah.” Daffyd waved off the notion. “I’d go nuts staring up at this ceiling every day.” He nodded up at the curved roof. “I’ll just have to put up with cramped spaceships.” He took a deep breath. “Sure will miss the fresh air, though.”

  Paul laughed. “That’s just the smell of bird shit and algae.”

  “The air’s filtered by the trees here,” Daffyd insisted. “Up to sixty percent, which takes a huge load off the atmo cyclers.”

  “Can’t you just pretend the station’s just a really big spaceship?”

  Daffyd shrugged. “Maybe. Anyway, what do you think are our chances of finding Kinsey on that island?”

  Paul looked ahead. The island was coming up fast, now only three hundred meters away. “I’d say more than seventy percent. It feels right. Can you think of a place he’s more likely to be?”

  “Seeing as I’ve only been here for a few days, no,” Daffyd said. “How often do you rely on feelings and hunches as a cop?”

  “You’d be surprised. A hunch is usually based on data I’ve seen but haven’t consciously put into perspective yet. It’s my subconscious’ way of saying hey, dumbass, look at this!”

  Daffyd grabbed Paul and shoved him toward a stairway leading down to the main deck. They descended and ran toward their crewmen who huddled near the bow.

  “I hope dumbass was paying attention, ‘cause it’s time to brace for impact.” Daffyd found a suitable corner formed by a ship’s rib and the outer hull. “Hang on!” he shouted at the men around him, all crewmen from the Rope a Dope. “Here it comes!”

  They all closed the helmets of their light dragoon armor.

  The ship screeched as she tore through the hydroelectric array that sat upstream of the island. Large modules tore loose and rolled beneath the freighter’s bow waves. The light metal catwalk used to maintain the array shattered like matchsticks as the bow ran up through it, heaving up onto the shore with a sigh of mud sliding against steel.

  “Go,” Paul roared as they leapt over the bow, their armor making light of the ten-meter drop. He raced ahead, jumping the low retaining walls that terraced their way up to the main structure.

  He came across a single guard, walking a sentry beat around the island in plain clothes. Before either could raise their weapon to fire, a shot from a dragoon behind Paul finished the man off.

 
He wished, momentarily, that he had thought to use suppressed weapons so the sound wouldn’t give their approach away but he realized it would have conferred little advantage, if any. The ruckus of smashing their old freighter ashore would certainly have alerted their quarry.

  It was still preferable to the slow, laborious maneuvering required to bring the ship into the receiving or shipping docks on the sides of the island.

  He reached the upstream door of the main wing and slammed his way through to find three armed men in the hallway. He fired a burst, cutting two of the unarmored guards down while another dragoon downed the third.

  He could hear heavy footfalls and knew what was coming. “Cover!” he shouted into the helmet’s pickups. “Take cover. Heavy Marine Armor ahead.”

  Paul ducked into a side door, stumbling over an overturned prototype printer and sprawling onto his face. He rolled to get up and saw, through the door, that a dragoon was standing in the middle of the hallway, firing his assault rifle down the hall. Before Paul could repeat his warning, a three-round 20mm burst punched through the man’s armored torso, hurling him back down the hall and out of Paul’s sight.

  “Zhentama!” Paul came to his feet and raced for the downstream wall. “Get out of the goucaode hallway! Just fire around the corner at him and keep him busy for a moment.”

  He hit the thin office wall, smashing through the weak barrier with ease in his light armor. The suit doubled his mass but also added to his speed and agility and he powered his bulk through the intervening walls to reach the Marine’s flank. He turned hard, tearing up the flooring fabric as he launched himself into a dive, smashing through the wall and back into the hallway at his enemy’s feet.

  Before the armored man could react to the new threat at his feet, Paul shoved his weapon up into the crevice beneath the HMA breastplate and squeezed the trigger. The rounds broke the seam holding the flexible, fixatropic abdominal armor to the breastplate. The segment of flexible armor affected by the round’s impact went temporarily hard but it also pushed back into the Marine’s abdomen driving his breath from his lungs and leaving a gap for Paul’s second burst to slice up into his chest cavity.

  He came to his feet as the HMA suit slumped into the rest position. The dragoons came out of the side offices and moved toward him but suddenly stopped and brought their weapons up as Paul heard the faint whine of micro-servos and mech-muscle tissue.

  Paul turned as the HMA suit returned to a full standing position. “Platoon flow,” he warned. “That means there’s at least one more active suit within fifty meters and I’m betting it’s in the main office. Let’s go. The longer it takes to get there, the longer Kinsey has to run off.”

  He raced off down the hallway toward the office. “Daffyd, take your team in from the neighboring office on the upstream side,” he ordered. “I’ll bring the rest in through the hallway wall and we’ll have ‘em in a crossfire. He reached the doorway and ran a couple of strides past it before turning and smashing his way through the wall, just ahead of the rest of his team.

  An armored man was in the center of the room, aiming at the door. He turned in surprise, running to his left as he brought his weapon to bear. Paul dove, relying on the aid of his implant to put a burst of full automatic fire into the man’s abdominal plates. The rounds sprayed the fixatropic sheeting, the fluid inside temporarily hardening in response to the impact of the small caliber rounds and preventing them from penetrating.

  Because he’d hit the abdomen while the Marine had been running, the plates froze at an awkward angle and, when the man tried to angle toward his target, his upper body couldn’t flex to maintain balance and he thundered into the carpeting, face first.

  Daffyd’s team burst through the side wall and, seeing their target on the floor, the engineer stepped over the prone form and slid his muzzle under the back of the cuirass, squeezing the trigger several times to break the seam and finish his enemy.

  It was only then, after the armored target was neutralized, that Paul’s suit registered the sound of heartbeats and heavy breathing coming from a door at the back of the office.

  He stepped over to the door, grabbed the handle and tore the door from its hinges, tossing it aside with ease.

  Rufus Kinsey stepped back, holding his hands out in a warding motion as he stumbled and fell backwards to sit on a mouldy toilet.

  “Make a good obituary,” Daffyd suggested as he came to stand next to Paul. “Rufus Kinsey, former Marine Colonel, dishonorably dismissed for high treason, killed hiding in the crapper.”

  Kinsey’s hands came down and he scowled at the two men in front of him. “You won’t be killing me today, gentlemen.”

  “Oh no?” Daffyd hefted his assault rifle. “These boys are from 1GD, you hundan. More than half of them have lost someone to your shenanigans. If Paul or I don’t kill you, one of them sure as hells will.”

  “And how will you get back home?” Kinsey sneered. “With my capture, you’d be heroes again. CentCom would have to welcome you instead of arrest you. Then my patrons can make a deal to get me released.” He laughed in their faces. “You need me alive!”

  “This is the problem with selfish people,” Daffyd told Paul, his tone conversational. “They all think they’re the lead character in their own little story so they assume the Universe will just arrange itself to their liking.”

  He looked back to Kinsey. “We like it here, ni tamade.” He shoved his rifle up against Kinsey’s chest, waited a heartbeat to see the fear, and pulled the trigger.

  Three rounds hammered into his chest cavity, tearing a hole through his heart and destroying one of his lungs.

  Paul turned from the dying man, ignoring his last moments. “Who’d we lose on the way in?”

  “Fredrickson, from Eddie’s squadron, and Kalashnikov took a bad hit to the shoulder. Might lose an arm.”

  “Hospital?”

  “We can’t afford to pay,” Daffyd spat the words out.

  “I’ve earned some funds since coming out here,” Paul told him. “I should have enough but, first…” He scanned around the room, walked over to an ornate carved wooden box on the desk that sat next to a credit chip terminal. He smashed the delicate lock on its front. A neat stack of credit chips were inside.

  “I’d say we can afford to have Kalashnikov looked after.” He handed Daffyd the box. “I’ll call in an air ambulance.”

  The look on the dragoons’ faces was worth more than all the money in that box.

  Intrusion

  Primary Javelin Mthellan knew his skin was several shades darker than normal. His head inclined forward and to the right by just a fraction before he mastered his rage and brought his unseemly histrionics under control. He’d been a ship’s javelin when the upstart Humans were still patting themselves on the back over their new pointy sticks.

  He knew better than to let his anger make a fool of himself and yet his self-control had failed him in front of his own bridge crew.

  The nerve of those Humans! Using an artificial singularity generator to disrupt a busy transit lane wasn’t terribly new. Raids had been carried out by their privateers from time to time.

  But this was different. This time, a naval force from their precocious Imperium was tripping Gray ships out of distortion and boarding them, claiming they were looking for abducted Humans.

  That they were certain to find some had no bearing on the matter. What damaged Mthellan’s calm was the fact that they were here, in Quorum space, projecting their will on sovereign Gray vessels. They were forcing their way aboard each ship and searching it as if they actually had the right to do so.

  He had half a lobe to fight them, but his was the only warship among the six stopped vessels and he had little doubt as to the outcome, should he attempt to bring his mains to bear on the Humans.

  It only added to his rage and humiliation that his cruiser had been assigned to protect this shipping lane. Here he sat, meekly awaiting a shuttle filled with the cursed Humans’ Naval-Infantry
.

  He blinked. Marines. The Humans called them Marines for some bizarre reason. Though Mthellan’s kind disdained infantry combat as an anachronistic throwback, he couldn’t deny the effectiveness of the concept as applied by the Humans.

  They liked to get in close with their ships, which carried far more in the way of secondary batteries than their Gray counterparts. It made targeting harder as the cone of a main guns firing envelope grew smaller as you got closer to the muzzle.

  It also opened opportunities for their Marines to get aboard Gray ships and seize them. Mthellan managed to stop himself from a haughty tilt of his head. Still, he wouldn’t fail in his duty to scuttle his ship in such a situation, as so many other javelins had. He was not so enamored of his long existence that he’d forget his duty.

  “A shuttle approaches,” his vizier, tertiary grade advised, his absolutely neutral tone a possible rebuke over Mthellan’s earlier outburst of physical anger.

  He opened a holo image of the forward landing bay and watched as the shuttle settled on the deck. He fought the anger as he noticed the gouges and dents made by the armored craft.

  Like the ship that had launched it, the shuttle bristled with weapons. And the medium-bore rail gun protruding above the cockpit could easily destroy his ship if they were to fire it while inside the landing bay.

  Heavily armored Marines came from the rear ramp as it hit the decking and they moved off in pairs to start their search of the ship. One of their number, their officer by the markings on his armor, went with the team heading for the cargo bay.

  Mthellan once again fought the urge to open fire on the Human ships. How dare they board his ship and not even report to its captain?

  “Gray vessels, this is General Windemere,” a harsh voice grated on the bridge sound system. “Any unauthorised movement will be met with severe penalties. Gray freighter seven-two-chimela-six-six, you are ordered to heave to or we will open fire without further warning.”