"Listen up!"
The room fell silent and Ridgeway paused for emphasis. "This is it folks, there is no Plan B. We get one shot with a couple thousand Marines betting their ass that we've got what it takes."
Darcy looked around the table. Two crescents of soft blonde hair framed her face, her good looks a disarming feature that had caused many to underestimate her. With a devilish smile she summed up the moment. "Well hell, boys, sounds like just another day in RAT-land."
A wave of testosterone-laden endorsement rippled around the table. Stitch extended a slow fist towards the sniper, who responded by rapping his knuckles with her own.
"Too right," Taz spat with a fierce nod. Merlin joined in with a hearty "Oorah."
Ridgeway silently watched the bravado, a mechanism for dealing with tension. As he shared their hungry resolve, his gaze made contact with each Marine in turn. The look carried a silent question.
Not an eye wavered in response. The solemn nods said they would follow him to the end. Ridgeway's gusto softened for an instant under the weight of that trust. It never got any lighter.
Ridgeway slammed the door on his emotions and shifted gear into wrap-up mode. "Anything else?"
Darcy grinned as she pulled a heavy railgun into her lap, her right hand stroking the massive scope that ran the receiver's length. A predatory gleam flashed across her blue eyes. "Sniper has everything she needs, sir."
Another muffled "oorah" resonated from Merlin's side of the table and Ridgeway smiled in spite of himself.
"Then it's a wrap." Ridgeway clapped his hands and the RATs quickly dispersed, each to their appointed preparation.
Ridgeway glanced at the clock. Stealth drop planetside in six hours, another fifteen to reach the phase one insertion point. Two hours to get sealed up, then to wait for their cue.
Monster was right about one thing, Ridgeway thought, a dark furrow creasing his brow. This is definitely gonna be a real bitch.
CHAPTER 4
Jenner poked tentatively through the coarse carpet of hair and winced as his fingertips bumped along the raw furrow in his scalp. He was stained, rumpled and badly in need of a stiff drink.
Slumped in the decently-lit garage at Cathedral's southern end, Jenner's composure slowly returned. By his own reckoning, his mood had upgraded from sheer panic to mere dismal surliness.
"Talk about a shit day for the books," Jenner scowled. The black nylon backpack sat between his feet, his jumbled belongings draped out of the top like guts from a disemboweled carcass. Half his shit was either damaged or lost back in the tunnel. Jenner prodded listlessly at the small digital music player, its clear acrylic surface cracked and filled with moisture.
Anger overcame a well-built foundation of self-pity and Jenner hurled the ruined device, which shattered against the rear of the truck. Grumbling under his breath, Jenner allowed his gaze to sweep along the length of the metal behemoth.
The truck was a monstrous creature, over twenty meters from nose to tail. At it's highest point, he figured it had to be almost five meters tall. The drab grey chassis looked to have started life as an industrial hauler, but the resemblance ended there.
The windows were covered with the same thick armor plate that shrouded the rest of the cab. Heavy steel panels curved over the nose and down the skirt, enclosing the forward gravitic coils. Along the sides, Jenner recognized something from his brush with basic training; double-stack plates mounted on explosive bolts. His eyes narrowed.
Reactive armor, the stuff you need when someone caps a missile at your ass. Jenner felt his jaw slack. Oh that can't be good.
Most of the vehicle's mass was its storage tank. Oval in cross-section, the tank was reinforced at intervals by thick metal bands that belted its girth. The outer surface of the tank, arguably a sandy beige at some point, was now discolored and pitted. Corrosion streaked down from every valve. Of the numerous messages once stenciled across the trailer, only a few were still legible. One, the designation MC-631, appeared just above a black and white diamond-shaped placard with a dissolving human hand depicted in its center.
Three dome turrets sat evenly along the tank's spine, each bristling with an array of faucets and handles. A group of braided-steel hose lines ran along the top of the trailer. Jenner could make out the word DECON stenciled along one set, and COOLANT emblazoned just beneath another.
Jenner kneeled to peer at the undercarriage. The storage tank sat on a pair of grease-covered rails that would allow mechanics to slide an empty tank off in exchange for a full one. Hex, they had repeated endlessly, was best handled slowly and carefully.
Hex; hydrogen hexafluoride. The Mother of All Acids. Jenner's gut had curled into a ball when he heard that one.
Frowning, Jenner wiped his hands across the front of his shirt as he moved to the cab. He climbed onto the running board and tapped the silver release. With a pneumatic whine the heavy door gull-winged open to reveal a dark, cluttered interior.
The cabin exuded a disconcerting blend of smells that embodied both decay and disinfectant. The sickly-sweet odor of antifreeze seeped up from the badly stained floor mats while the upholstery reeked of old cigar smoke.
"S'matter boy? Lose the keys already?"
Jenner practically jumped from his seat at the unexpected voice. The figure at the door looked to be in his early sixties, though his physique still carried the lean hardness of someone familiar with work. Swatches of grey at his temples were well on their way to overrunning the last vestiges of brown tenaciously holding ground on his skull. His skin had the texture of tanned leather left too long in the sun, although how anybody could catch a few rays down here struck Jenner as something of a mystery.
Too surprised to reply, Jenner watched mutely as the old man fished a soiled red rag from his pocket for what seemed to be the sole purpose of exchanging the grime on his hands for older grime that had been saved on an earlier date. Neither the rag nor the hands came away any cleaner, but the hand rose up and reached into the open doorway.
"Briggs. Hank Briggs." Stained teeth remained clenched on the wreck of an old cigar.
"Hey," Jenner took the offered hand, thankful at the moment just to have some human company. "Uh, I mean, Private Jenner, sir." He fumbled to follow the handshake with a sloppy salute, the two gestures colliding haphazardly.
Briggs snorted. "Don't ‘sir' me boy, I'm a sergeant, I work for a living." Then, a little more casually, "Briggs'll do just fine."
Like most things in Jenner's new career, the rebuff seemed to reflect some tidbit of military culture beyond his understanding. But the fact that Briggs didn't make a federal case out of the whole rank thing was a good sign. The sergeant didn't seem at all like the ORA hardliners, most of whom Jenner felt took themselves and their little army routine far too seriously. Looking at Brigg's rumpled figure, Jenner wondered if all the fuck-ups got flushed to the garbara heap at the bottom of the mine.
Without waiting for comment or invitation, Briggs climbed into the cab and launched into what seemed a well-worn lecture. Briggs' job was to handle all the complicated equipment while Jenner drove. The apparent simplicity of that assertion failed to deter the sergeant's obviously hell-bent desire to point out every switch, dial and display in the cluttered cockpit.
Jenner's mind glazed over six minutes into the diatribe. His gaze meandered up a cluster of instruments on the cab's ceiling and fixed on a small hinged cover made of red plastic. He half-heartedly reached up to see what was hidden beneath.
"Don't even think about it." The icy tone stopped Jenner in mid-reach.
The private snatched his hand back as though from a snake. "What, what?"
Briggs eyed him with a flat, cold stare as his square jaw worked steadily on the cigar. Several seconds passed in dead silence. Jenner had become familiar with the tactic; authority figure trying to decide if a lecture was warranted. In his mind Jenner paced off a silent cadence.
One thousand one, one thousand two--
At one tho
usand six, the sergeant spoke. Jenner felt a twinge of relief when Briggs went straight into the answer without a nagging preamble.
"Detonator."
Any onset of relief vanished in an instant. "Detonator?" Jenner's tone jumped a full octave, "you mean like for a bomb?"
In mute reply, Briggs reached forward and tapped a switch on the dash. With a soft hiss of compressed air, the back wall of the cab slid open to reveal a sizable compartment, as wide as the vehicle and roughly a meter and a half tall. The inner walls were lined with yet another layer of armor plate, keloids of welded metal marking the seams where panel edges met. The left and right walls carried an impressive array of electronics. In the darkness, a myriad of tiny diodes flashed in ever-changing colors.
"You're looking at a sleeper cabin before the MIL-spec mods." Briggs slid into another bout of technical show-and-tell. "I made the bunk bed myself, rigged it together out of an old G-couch. These babies were designed to protect fighter pilots from the stress of all that violent hot-shit maneuvering."
Jenner looked incredulously at the huge piece of equipment and couldn't imagine how Briggs wedged the damn thing there in the first place. The slate-grey couch looked like it was made out of a smooth, high-impact plastic. A braid of cables stuck out from one end, clipped nubs splayed like multi-color porcupine quills.
"The main block isn't powered but I got Delkins in the motorpool to run a low-voltage line to the gelpacks. Talk about a bed that fits like a glove. A fellah lookin' to goldbrick for a few hours would be hard-pressed to find a better hiding place."
Briggs rolled a critical eye at Jenner. "Only don't even think about pulling that shit on me ‘cause that's the first place I'll look."
Jenner nodded his concession, seeing no gain to be made with a verbal response.
Briggs continued in an offhand tone. "Anyway, some of that commo shit back there is pretty hush-hush, stuff they don't want falling into enemy hands. If you look under the G-couch you'll see how serious they are about it."
Jenner craned his neck to get a look beneath the gloss grey frame. Nestled in a coil of heavy black cable sat a bundle of bricks that looked like off-white plasticine clay. Each brick was wrapped in clear cellophane and carried the bold designation THERMALITE. A narrow metal cylinder, about the diameter of a drinking straw, had been driven through the wrapper and deep into the center of each brick. Wires ran from the exposed ends to a tight bundle that swept back behind the couch.
"That, boy," Briggs said, "is a twenty-kilo package of military-grade incendiary. As ‘cindies go, Therms' the real deal. It'll do zero to three thousand degrees in a hundredth of a second. That's enough heat to turn steel into steam. If things go south in a big way, the last thing we're supposed to do is hit the magic button and the whole rig goes up in a puff of smoke."
Jenner's sense of comfort, much like a puff of smoke, evaporated. A foul edge crept back into his mood as he peered at the stack of incendiary. Three thousand degrees.
"Technically," Briggs continued with an utter lack of concern in his voice, "you could still sleep back there, but any more I just use it to store extra gear and supplies. It's amazing what you can scrounge up when you look."
As if to emphasize the point, Briggs hooked a thumb back towards the compartment. "See that?"
The crumpled mass of violently fluorescent orange was hard to miss. Even badly smudged with grease, it practically glowed in the dark. Jenner nodded absently, his eyes and mind still focused on the Thermalite.
"Well, that's a genu-wine Garsons Drysuit, just about the best deep-sea survival wear ever developed. I scored it from Koslovski in surplus for a bottle of homebrew hooch."
Jenner's brow knotted as he looked at the suit's rubbery exterior. Sealable flaps covered each heavy-duty zipper. Black-rubber fingers stuck out from one side of the bungie-corded bundle. Thick-soled boots hung from the opposing side.
"I hate to be the one to bring you a news flash Sarge, but there ain't even a lake on this hunk of rock, much less an ocean." A brief veneer of intolerance played across Jenner's face, much like a child's disdain for the unbearable stupidity of a parent.
The sergeant's eyes narrowed. "Yeah, like you'd have a clue. Do you have any idea how cold the nights get up top around here? Real cold! The heating system in that sumbitch will keep my ass toasty in a deep-freeze. It's made of rubberized Kevlar that was designed to stand up to shark bite, so it sure as hell will stand up to a pounding wind. Now, you tell me Mr. Brain Surgeon, if we get stranded somewhere up top and have to bail this beast, what are you planning on wearing-- a T-shirt?"
A retort formed on Jenner's lips that he just as quickly discarded. Instead, he looked sullenly at the bare metal floorboards, muttered something under his breath, then fell silent.
Briggs snorted again. "Uh-huh, thought so." His teeth worked the cigar with a fervor that appeared to match his level of agitation. Jenner fixed his eyes on the dash and a long wordless interval ticked by before Briggs rummaged through some of the other junk in the darkness. "Got some other stuff, spare parts, shotgun, stack of MREs, couple grenades--"
"Oh great", Jenner spat, "what goes better with twenty keys of Thermalite than a couple of grenades? Guess the PX was out of nukes that day, huh?"
Briggs rolled his eyes. "Geeze boy! You always this whiney?" He didn't wait for a reply. "Listen, that compartment is sealed up as tight as the damn tank, maybe tighter. As far as HQ is concerned, the electronics back there are more important than we are so they're not about to let ‘em get toasted by accident. The walls are reinforced and the wiring is top-grade. The detonator is on it's own power source and it's shielded all to hell. You can't flip the switch cover without a key and without the switch you'd have to shoot the damn Thermalite to get it to cook off." He leaned forward, his bloodshot eyes fixed on Jenner's, "and we're not about to start firing guns in here, now are we?"
"No."
"All right then, quit yer sissy-ass bellyaching and start paying attention. Come tomorrow we're gonna find out just how good a driver you are."
CHAPTER 5
Jenner sighed wearily as an arc of yellow light swept through the darkness, rotating to the pulsing drone of a warning claxon. With a hammer-on-anvil ring, hydraulic rams withdrew a dozen steel lugs back into the reinforced doorframe. A widening shaft of light poured out as the sixteen-ton doors parted with a deep, grinding rumble. With a final, metallic clang the elevator doors stood open.
The surge of relief helped him ignore Briggs' most recent jab. "What'd I tell ya? Out and back. That wasn't so bad, was it?"
Truth be told, Jenner thought, "miserable" would have been a better description.
Driving the huge truck out to the chem facility had been a constant struggle, followed by a long wait as the empty hex tank was swapped for a full one. After wrangling a swimming pool full of hex back across the rough terrain, the lights of the compound looked like heaven.
Most of the tarmac was framed by a thick berm of gravel and slag that had been bulldozed into an expedient barricade. The top of the berm was laced with twisted coils of razor-ribbon. A pair of concrete guard towers rose above the makeshift wall, defining the forward edge of the courtyard.
The southern edge backed directly into the base of the mountain. Tons of stone had been cut away to create a sheer wall that rose nearly thirty meters. Centered in that flat expanse of granite, a lone window gazed down upon the courtyard. The wide elevator door centered directly below the window.
Orange-vested figures emerged from the mammoth elevator, followed by two small yellow tractors that bristled with antannae. The vehicles moved to either side of the truck while technicians scurried about hauling power lines and air hoses.
Jenner tossed a weary nod, "What's the deal?"
"Security runs a scan of the tank," Briggs replied. "Gotta make sure we didn't pick up anything like a tracking device or a bomb."
"Aside from the one we packed ourselves?"
Briggs gave two rapid strokes on th
e fetid cigar but otherwise ignored the comment. "That scanner can look clean through the truck, it'll even spot cracks in the tank wall. Better to know out here before we haul this thing into the shaft. Last time we had a leak was when some idiot opened the pressure valve on the input line without checking to see that the backflush had been set." Briggs paused, watching Jenner process the information. "You wouldn't happen to know what happened next, wouldja?"
"No backflush," Jenner chewed his lip and squinted. "Well, the Hex would have run through the lines under pressure, but instead of flowing into the tank it would have bounced at the backflush valves and routed into the overflow tank."
"Yeah..." Briggs coaxed.
"At normal line pressure the overflow tank would have maxed out pretty quick. The extra would have nowhere to go but out, and end up as spillage." The private looked up to see Briggs staring blankly. Jenner grimaced, wondering which part of the process he had botched.
Before Jenner could utter a retraction, the grey stubble on Briggs' craggy jaw parted. Slowly, unbelievably, a grin crawled across the sergeant's face. "Well I'll be damned son, you go off and read a book or something when I wasn't looking?"
Jenner exhaled fully and smiled in return. "Nah," he replied off-handedly, "I've got a hardass boss who beats this crap into my head."
"Wha-- Oh, hardass is it?" Briggs snorted in mock anger as he snatched the cap from his head and swatted Jenner's chest with a lazy backhand smack. "Well it damn sure would take a hardass to pound some sense into that thick skull of yours!"
The rough camaraderie came as close to a genuine moment of friendship as Jenner could recall, and he liked the feeling.
Brilliant light flared at the truck's two forward corners, drawing closer as the scanner units crawled down the length of the truck in tandem. As the glow intensified, Jenner noted a foreign sound over the gusting wind, a whistle that grew deeper and louder.
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