by William Cray
Cole approached the console. Firing had faded and voices yelled out as they cleared the chamber and began to aid their wounded.
Taking the step up to the cupola he looked over the maze of controls and readouts, staring down at the digital dials and gauges. He stared at the screens and listened to the automated requests of the override computer, toning in the background. He stared at them for a long time, and after a moment of dizzy clarity, they seemed to begin to make sense. The dial cued up on the display would open the floodgates to the node, sending the power down the line and to the place where it was needed. The city was in danger. By lighting the Stratospire, a call for help would go out and they might be saved.
Cole began to feel dizzy and his hand pressed against the console to stabilize him. Everything around him seemed blurred and unreal as a kaleidoscope of images swirled around his periphery. But the digital switch on the console glowed bright, begging for his intervention, for the good of all.
His hand searched for the lever. Ready to open it with a flick of his wrist.
Maintenance Ring A
The Stratospire
The concussion of the blast arrived as the flash blinded her systems, her body and armored shell against the wall of the corridor. Anne had seen the maimed cop on the floor clutching his severed arm just before the explosion.
She skidded down the Stratospire’s interior pathways. The rapid G-loads crushed against her armor and shock fields. The suit absorbed the blast but the rapid change in pressure and acceleration jarred her body inside the black suit as she was carried along the cylindrical corridor before smashing into the walls.
She gasped as the air was forced from her lungs at the violent stop and the S.P.E.C.A.T.S sensor net blanked out to protect her eyes and sensors from the flash of the explosion.
She was fuzzy from the G-loading on her body from the explosion. She felt the prick of an infusion of stimulants into her bloodstream. As her sensors clicked back on, the world in front of her was askew. The dancing lights made her dizzy. It was either a concussion or something was wrong with her systems. Probably both.
With dexterous fingers inside rigid claws, she gripped her dislodged face shield, and ripped away the malfunctioning display suffocating her with incoherent images.
She looked at the wreckage of the explosion through the undamaged clear visor of her helmet under the discarded face shield. Smoke was swept away by the towers fire suppression system and the noxious gasses were sucked out by the thin atmosphere, leaving the interior cold and dark. The corridor was wrecked from the explosion, leaving a gaping hole that opened the central elevator shaft all the way to the Martian atmosphere.
Data started to flow onto her eye filaments from her suit again. She checked her position.
The Intruder mind control antenna array was just outside, just below the access doors and down the exterior shaft to the maintenance ring.
This segment of the Stratospire was held together by a thin membrane, cutting down the weight and stress on the anchoring strands of the structure. The six carbon nano-tube strands connecting Mars and Phobos were recessed into central shafts walls, and should have been protected from the explosion, but Anne was careful where she punched her hole.
With the extended bayonet, she ripped through the remaining fibrous exterior skin of the tower, slicing a long thin incision along a vertical axis, until hitting one of the towers millions of hexagonal nano filament support struts. With powerful actuators she pushed an arm through, rupturing the womb of the Stratospire’s skin.
A shimmering ring lay seventy meters below her, ethereal tentacles jutting out in to the sky.
The Hebes Chasma was black. A series of flashes in the dark revealed battles were still raging across the surface domes.
Somewhere he is down there, Anne thought. She leapt again, falling into the waving tentacles outside the tower below her.
The maintenance ring was a flimsy structure anyway, where weight and stress were monitored against the relatively fragile frame of the Stratospire at this altitude. It was a narrow platform around the diameter of the Stratospire, with a shelf for construction materials and an automated crane, operated remotely from a command center below. Anne landed softly, using more power from her near empty fuel cells. There was less available power than she planned, bit there was still enough to rip and shred. She looked along the closest one hundred meter long tentacle that extended out from the ring. The antennas shimmered less this close.
The background noise of the Intruder influence, ringing in her mind, was only an echo now. She was closer to the antenna than anyone. Its pulse was silent now that she was in the eye of the array.
Bounding around the rings circumference she examined each of the antenna connections. There were no obvious power couplings, linking the ring to the Stratospire. She moved on to each antenna tentacle after the cursory search, finding them hard fused to the maintenance ring with seamless moly-binding.
Gotta do things the hard way, she thought, releasing the heavy modular kit from her shoulder mounts, dropping it down on the catwalk and kneeling to open its contents and remove the few precious demo charges Cochrane was able to scrounge up. She removed the extrusion gun from the kit, and slid in the first explosives cylinder, bounding over to the first antenna joint. She examined the stress points, looking for a weakness. The people on the surface would just have to take their chances with the plunging javelins. She ran out along its length, the luminous tritanium cloaking field blurring the antenna frame at its tips like a sun devil at the edges. Her suit’s environmental systems provided a steady blanket of air and warmth in the harsh atmospheric environment. Sure-grip boots secured her against the whipping winds corkscrewing around the Stratospire.
Finding the most likely stress point about twenty meters out on the antenna, she knelt down, preparing to apply the demolition gel with the extruder gun.
A proximity alarm blared in her ear, as the edge of a long steel finger from the Stratospire lurched out at her, swiping at her like an errant fly. Flattening against the antenna, the maintenance ring auxiliary crane traversed over her head, just inches from crashing into her and tossing her into the sky. The cranes manipulator hand snapped like a desperate reptile's jaws, just missing her torso. The cranes momentum carried it beyond the antenna edge, but whipped back at her in a back handed stroke.
Anne jumped back to her feet as the curled crane arm whipped just behind her again. With a deft pirouette she rushed towards the ring base, extruder still in her hands and the arm swung back, this time above her, along the antenna beam, sweeping across it like a long iron rod, trying to bat the leaping Anne Braisselle into the sky. The arm swept away, around the Stratospire’s far side as she rushed towards the manipulator mechanism. The swinging arm passed just a foot above the ring surface, and she watched it sweep the kit of demo charges off the antenna and into the abyss.
“Fuck,” she roared.
The arm whipped around the base of the Stratospire, disappearing from view.
Anne reached the base of the arm, ducking the counter-weight, as it bludgeoned past. She lowered the extrusion gun onto the bezel ring as it rotated, flowing the explosive gel along its surface as the arm continued its maniacal backhand around the tower.
The arm was fast, but not that fast. She laid the gel down in a long stream. The arm whipped back around in a sweeping arc. It slashed just below and she leapt as it ripped below her feet as momentum carried the arm past her.
She pivoted ten meters above the ring, her empty thrusters giving her a brief hover at the apex of her jump. She sent the signal and the gel ignited in a blinding flash, burning away a jagged section of the crane bezel.
The crane arm ripped free, sending the counterweight careening away from the maintenance ring in a spiral. The arm flung into the night as the counterweight pitched downward, crashing into one of the lightly constructed mind control antennas, smashing its base and dislodging it from the ring
in a violent crash of fragmented metal, before continuing its spiral into the next array. Two antennas followed the tumbling counterweight into the Martian night in a crisscross of tangled iron tackle, descending slowly in the Martian gravity, but with the twisted mass of a plunging train wreck.
Anne Braiselle howled in victory.
The maintenance ring whirled as the remaining antennas swept into place, replacing the ruined teeth like a shark's fangs.
34
Mars Orbital Tower
Radiation Exclusion Zone
Security Center
Duran was helpless against neuro disruptor held against his neck. He watched as the shadow of the knife came up behind him, angling down for the coup de grace. Duran felt a shudder go through him. Celeste was gone.
Floss’s body seemed to relax from its inflamed tension, and the disruptor at his neck went slack for just an instant. The fiery current flowing through Duran’s nervous system fell away as Floss lowered the device. A quiet moan leaked out of his lips.
It was enough. The machine inside Duran had been waiting for this chance. It fired a series of commands down the narrow nano-optical pathways running through this body, to the brainstem and nerve clusters waiting for orders. Like a lighting bolt, Duran struck, rotating over in a snapping death roll, snatching Floss with one hand and crashing him to the floor, bones breaking as all Duran’s amped force whipshod him down. The air was crushed out of Floss, gasping in asphyxiation through broken ribs and a fractured arm. Duran folded the knife back on him in complete domination.
Duran released his grip, pushing away, out of arms reach. The knife was still in Floss’s hand, his arm twisted like a broken branch. Duran stood back, pulling the big Talon out of his holster. He could feel Celeste flooding back in. Whatever had broken the link for an instant was gone and her presence re-entered the room.
Floss scrambled off the floor, ignoring the blood streaming from his split lip and crooked nose, climbing back to his feet. He switched knife hands and crouched in a defensive posture. Duran saw the absence in his eyes.
He is gone, Duran thought.
Duran shot him in the chest. The Mag-gun round deflected when it hit the layered body armor of Floss’ torso. The body armor made the damage even worse by containing the explosion of the warhead and multiplying its effects. Floss's chest turned into a mangled vessel of flesh, organ tissue and blood. He crumpled straight down, his torso collapsed as the support of his spinal column was pulverized. Floss's eyes continued to stare up at Duran with a haunting intensity, but they glassed over as he died. The air and blood bubbled out of his mouth in gouts. His brain expired and the grip of the Intruder was released.
Duran checked his ruined friend, making sure he wasn’t suffering then reached over and closed James Floss’s eyes. Duran’s teeth clenched as he looked down at him.
“I’m going to kill you all for this,” he grumbled out loud. “I’m going to kill you all!”
He stood up and crossed over to the main security panel, slamming his fist on the panel, sending a jolt of pain racing up his arm.
Duran jerked the infoboard from his vest, setting it on the console and enabling its manual input. His connection to the network had been cut away by Floss.
Duran ran his infoboard's data wire to a hard-wired connection point. He activated the codebreaker and infiltration system, cycling through command functions after it gave him limited access on the security console.
Duran cycled through the various sensors and displays on the central console, sifting the enormous structure’s security apparatus to locate his target.
Somewhere inside, Celeste and her companion were waiting.
He could still feel her presence, but she was powerless to influence him through the machine. She can’t touch me. I’m going to make her pay for this.
Structural alarms began to go off and Duran cycled the camera’s to view the damaged areas. A series of ground level cameras showed bright fires and damaged domes at the base of the tower. A lance of steel pierced one small dome like a hypodermic through a boil. Another nearby causeway had a large transparent section crushed by a large block of tangled metal, flattening it. Duran scanned back to the lance. It was the blunted remains of an antenna. A crane error message flashed across the display on another section of tower, which he accessed with a touch. Duran watched as a black SPECATS sliced through another of the antennas with a blue stream of translucent fire, pealing away the antenna link from the ring. It fell through the sky from almost ten kilometers up.
“Swift.” Duran said to no one. “Still breaking hearts and crushing dreams.” For the first time in a long while he felt himself rip a wide grin, watching her tear shit up.
A gray flash jumped across one of the cycling exterior monitors. Duran interfaced with the scanner controls, slewing the camera angles, trying to reacquire the gray streak.
Nothing.
A series of proximity alerts triggered in rapid succession, followed by collision warnings. The sensor angle snapped views to an underside shot of the maintenance ring, looking down the length of the Stratospire.
There. Climbing on a pillar of fire.
A military long-range delta winged transport streaked vertically along the tower. The Dauntless was rising fast, a shockwave of energy trailed behind it in a ripple of compressed atmosphere pealing off its leading edges.
Duran looked for the communication relays. He jacked in his infoboard, entering the Shogun emergency frequency. The encryption gear in his infoboard took long seconds to synchronize as the big ship streaked along the outside of the Stratospire. A confirming beep sounded, as he watched the Dauntless begin to roll, like a shark in attack mode, exposing its underside and the mounted gun turret to the tower face.
There wasn’t time.
The vessel was slowing as it peaked, pulling up over the rim of the maintenance ring, bringing it level and swinging its auto-gun forward in a menacing arc just meters below the ring.
“Swift… Incoming….”
“…Incoming…south side!”
The gray triangle rose up rapidly, shooting skyward with a shockwave of energy pulsing behind it. A stream of hot kinetic energy lanced out, boiling the air and sky away around Anne Braiselle as she leapt free of the attack in cat-like spring, spewing counter fire from her Mag-gun and showering the area with flares and jammers until they clicked empty.
Through the chaos of the attack she screamed over her com-system, elated, “Rory!”
Before a response chimed back into her waiting ear, the arrowhead struck again, a second streaming volley lancing across her front, causing her to roll away from the ripping projectiles, peppering the ring’s surface in a superheated bubbling of vaporized carbon, severing yet another antenna from the structure for her. The arrowhead attacker pealed back away from the tower in a long arching inverted roll, increasing distance and exposing its aft quarter to Swift, who responded to the tactical error, sending a flurry of directed hypervelocity rounds into the engine compartments.
The rounds cracked and split away from the glowing engines in a red stream, diverted by defensive dispersion fields as her rounts hammered into ancillary parts of the big ship, ripping large holes in the hull, but causing no critical damage.
The ship continued to nose over, now below the maintenance ring’s horizon and turning wide along the shaft, wrapping around the Stratospire on an invisible tether.
Swift called back on the com, but an error flashed. Her com-system was spiked. The last attack had clipped her VG antenna and would take time to regenerate. Time that ticked away as the Dauntless curled around for another attack.
Swift ducked around the far side of the tower, running across the damaged area of the ring and skip leaping across it, relying on the decision to trade armor for speed. Glancing over the ring lip, expecting to see the top quarter of the ship as they pulled around, she darted away when another burst of powerful energy sliced past her. The Dauntless pi
lot was good, rolling inverted and maintaining the pull around the Stratospire, while maneuvering the ships gun turret into firing position. The pulse scored the Stratospire’s thin skinned covering, cutting away a slice of black flesh and exposing the nano-carbon hex structure which glowed white hot with the slash.
She activated her automated electronic warfare system, but it would eat power like mad. She knew she couldn’t keep it up for long. They would either burn through the jamming, or she would run out of battery life.
The ship edged again over the lip of the ring, maintaining its inverted turn, cutting lose a third devastating lash of the weapon, just behind her, but missing the Stratospire’s structure. Skidding to a stop, the gun tracked forward of her as the ship rounded the edge again. She was dead and she knew it. The weapon would traverse onto her and burn through her suit first before blowing her to pieces. Desperate, she lashed out again with the Assault Talon as the ship slowed its turn to a hover. The Dauntless leveled its wings as it closed the distance like a predator with its next meal cornered.
She was stuck. The dispersion fields drove away her insolent fire into the darkness, but the killing strike didn’t come. Instead the raptor hovered just two dozen meters away, its gun tracking, but silent. She looked down. She was standing on another of the precious antennas.
With a rapid jerk she whipped back away along the ring. Fire scathed the air in front of her, but stopped short of burning her down before she raced around the corner of the Stratospire.
Duran watched the battle unfold as the big Dauntless stalked and cornered Lieutenant Braiselle. He was helpless to assist her. He raged at the monitor, through the dead coms. “Attack… Attack goddammit.”
The Dauntless couldn’t fire on the tower or the ring. The Intruder couldn’t risk severing any more of the antennas. Swift had the advantage and didn’t see it. The entire Stratospire was her hostage.
