by Aer-ki Jyr
As he prepped their gear, Jason stayed at the tram’s control terminal, monitoring their progress. Theoretically the Chinese could be doing the same from the spaceport’s control room, but with any luck they would be distracted by the assaults taking place elsewhere in the sector. Even if they weren’t and did notice the tram coming, it wouldn’t matter, but the less attention they attracted the better, which was why they’d been scheduled to arrive hours after the others had already started their sweep through the outer facilities.
When the tram approached the spaceport it automatically slowed, braking magnetically against the rail it was floating above, offering no vibration or bumps, just a slow forward momentum tilt until the car arrived at and crept into the pancake-like spaceport just below the surface and even with level 4.
As soon as it got into the large terminal it came up against a stop wall, then the section of track beneath it detached and lowered down two levels, connecting to and depositing it on a holding track that sat below four other tram line entrances that connected out to other spaceports. All of the cars from those lines also came down on removable sections of track and were deposited on the holding level on different spur lines, some of which had to be rotated about to match up rail sections in a very confined, but precise futuristic version of a train station roundhouse.
Using the onboard controls, Jason paused the movement of their car, preventing it from being shuffled to the central lift and accessing the door controls in an attempt to override their atmospheric protocols, given that the tram terminal was, like the underground tunnels that they traveled through, completely unpressurized. Jason had to look up and input an override code from the databank, confirm the command three times through varying button combinations, and submit a timed command sequence before the computer finally let him execute the potentially fatal command, asking him one last time to abort.
Do you truly want to open the door in an unpressurized area, killing all those onboard? (Y/N)
Jason smiled at the programmer’s sense of humor and hit ‘yes.’
Immediately the doors cracked open and the air inside the cabin rushed out in its entirety before the doors fully retracted into the walls. Both of their armored suits immediately shifted from external air draw to oxygen backups, meaning they were now on the clock.
Paul walked by, loaded up with gear, and handed Jason his harness before stepping out the door and falling two stories down to the bottom of the terminal, landing amicably well thanks to the reduced lunar gravity. He stepped aside to make room for Jason who, after setting the trigger on a special container in the tram, dropped down behind him, with the tram doors closing some twenty seconds later as the timed sequence began to run its course.
When the doors closed the cabin repressurized using atmospheric backups and the halt command lifted, sending the tram on its way with only a small delay that the Chinese wouldn’t be able to detect, given their unfamiliarity with the systems.
Jason and Paul walked off to the side of the lower level as their tram car passed by several others above them and moved into the central lift, which then lowered it down to the bottom level and connected to the single track there, which shuffled it up against the docking port that led into the station.
There wasn’t a lot of extra room below, but more than enough to walk around in, capable of holding several more trams if there had been extra tracks. Looking up they could see the underside of the holding lines, but that wasn’t what they were searching for.
They’d gone over the spaceport blueprints in detail, enough to be able to spot the exact wall segment they needed, so it didn’t take long before Paul’s arm lifted up and pointed to a location directly under one of the holding tracks along the wall opposite the docking port.
“There?” he asked for verification.
“I think so,” Jason agreed.
“Don’t think so, know so…or we’ll run out of air before we get a second chance.”
“Know so…get going.”
Paul walked over to the wall underneath the holding track and pointed a magnetic grapple gun up at the underside and fired. The projectile, approximately the size of a hockey puck, attached without incident, trailing a sturdy synthetic rope behind it. Paul dropped the pistol on the ground, along with the excess line in a bundle as Jason leapt up and grabbed hold, then climbed up to the top next to the sweet spot on the wall, identifiable as nothing significant other than its place underneath the track.
Still on the ground, Paul pulled a large canister off his harness and began to unfold the soft seal airlock as Jason hung by an arm several meters above him. The construction began to expand into the phone booth-like airlock on its own while Paul took a step back and detached a bracing addition from his harness and expand that manually, looking like a short scaffold. When it was locked in place he walked over to the bottom of the rope and tossed it up towards Jason, who caught it with little trouble.
The next maneuver was a bit more difficult, and involved Jason finding the exact position on the wall and placing the scaffold over top of it, then triggering the bonding agents on the scaffold’s tips to melt and seal it in place, all while hanging on the rope. He accomplished this by flipping head over heels and lassoing his foot in the top of the rope, allowing him to use both hands to maneuver the frame in place. Once it was secure he gave Paul a thumbs up, who then tossed up the portable airlock.
Jason caught the top edges and pulled it up using a sit-up maneuver to get the proper height, then attached one of the two faces containing doors to the premade latch points, snapping it in place though no sound was audible in the nearly airless chamber. What atmosphere had been gained from the tram’s depressurization had already expanded and dissipated down the rail lines outside the spaceport, creating a less than negligible atmosphere, given that those lines ran hundreds of miles.
Jason grabbed the rope and unhooked his foot, flipping back right side up before touching the second stage activation button, which sprouted the expandable material ring with adhesive edge. The circle of material expanded outward quite far, with Jason tugging on it to get the maximum expansion before he pushed it down past the scaffold frame until it touched the wall. The solid spokes in the barrier bent over like an umbrella and allowed the clay-like outer ring to touch and stick to the wall without any recoil pressure.
It took a long time for Jason to maneuver around the entire ring, smooshing the clay in place and forming the tent-like canopy over the blank wall section, but once he was confident he had an airtight seal he triggered the third stage activation and the clay melted and hard bonded to the wall, throwing off a bit of smoke in the process.
He waited a long time before he triggered the fourth stage, wanting to make sure the liquefied seal material had solidified before the canopy inflated and stretched out, making the walls of the umbrella appear to go rigid and no longer drooping in between the spokes.
“Tag,” Jason said, hopping off the rope and falling to the floor.
Paul responded by climbing up and wiggling into the claustrophobic airlock. No pressurization sequence was necessary since the other side had no air as well, but it still took him a good minute to get himself and his equipment harness through and inside the scaffold perimeter, which thankfully was secured to the wall well enough to hold his weight.
Judging the approximate position on the wall, he pulled out a powered drill and dug the tip into the metallic panel, for once not liking Star Force’s robust design, because the metal plate was well over half an inch think, and behind it was additional sealant and wall material that took him several minutes to get through.
When he did a stream of air shot through and began to fill the vacuum underneath the umbrella, expanding it in size until the spokes held tight, secured to the wall via the ring. The soft seal airlock had been designed for exactly this type of situation, but Paul still breathed a sigh of relief when the ring held firm and his little tent became an extension of the spaceport’s atmosphere…otherwis
e it would have provided a continuous leak down the rail lines.
A small hole like that could easily have been patched, but not the one Paul was about to make. He slid a tiny, rod-like probe into the hole and piped the image through to his head’s up display, getting a look at exactly what was on the other side of the wall. The end of the rod curled like a snake on command, allowing him to see in all directions as he rotated it around, judging where exactly he needed to cut.
Mentally planning it out, Paul retracted the probe and put both it and the drill back on his harness, exchanging them for a cutting torch. He lit the precise, almost too tiny to see blue flame and began tracing one edge of a square on the wall, outlining his cuts with a tiny groove before going back over them again and burning all the way through. As he did, his suit began processing the atmosphere rather than using his backup oxygen, with the heat level noticeably rising with each breath as the torch slowly cooked the tent’s air. Meanwhile Jason waited below him in vacuum, still pulling from his reserve oxygen tanks, one part of his armor and the other an auxiliary attached at the back of his neck identical to the one Paul wore.
After twelve minutes of cutting Paul finally made it all the way around the square a second time, seeing the segment shift ever so slightly as the last physical connection was severed. He shut off the torch and gently kicked the piece inside the station, feeling a cool rush of air enter his helmet as the heated air mixed with the rest of the atmosphere inside the hotel suite.
Paul tossed the torch through, then followed himself, going feet first and landing on a hot tub, fortunately with the cover on. He stood up and stepped off, taking a look around and making sure the room was empty. “I’m through.”
“Are we good?” Jason asked, climbing the rope.
“No welcome party,” Paul said, pulling off his equipment harness and unslinging his stinger rifle from his back latch. He walked into the next room, finding it equally empty, and waited at the door for Jason.
He came through a couple minutes later, his suit now replenishing its oxygen supply by draining small amounts out of the air as he was now back to normal respiration. With no more time limit to worry about and the hole they cut in the wall temporarily sealed, they’d successfully made an end run around the Chinese blockade at all the known entry points…and with the rest of their teams attacking the auxiliary sites and not the spaceport, odds were the internal security doors would still be open, as well as the elevators, giving them freedom of movement until they were discovered.
The question was, how long would that last? And when they were spotted by a security camera or guard, how much firepower did the Chinese have to throw at them? They had no eyes on this spaceport, no reports on numbers or placement of defenses, just guestimates based off the initial reports from the other teams, none of which had taken their target sectors by the time that Paul and Jason had dropped out of contact.
The pair of adepts may have made it behind enemy lines, but the real question, one posed by Kerrie before they left, was how much damage could the two of them alone do?
Paul had responded by reminding her that they were the high scoring tandem pair for a reason.
“You ready for this?” Jason asked.
“Just try and keep up,” he said, cracking the door and pausing to listen outside for a moment before he stuck his head out. “Clear.”
Jason followed him out and shut the door behind him ever so softly, then quickstepped following Paul, trying to make as little noise as possible as they worked their way through the resort hotel, making sure to stay clear of known security camera positions, which they’d memorized beforehand.
When the tram that Jason and Paul arrived in docked with the terminal, the doors opened automatically in response to the connection, along with the terminal’s doors, exposing the interior of the tram at the forward section to the security camera above the bulky doors, which were partially open, leaving a narrow, man-wide slit between them on the other side of which sat a machine gun turret bolted into the floor, in direct line with the tram’s doors, waiting to shoot the first person that came into view.
No one appeared, however, and the Chinese troops didn’t know how to respond, so they just waited…and waited…and waited, but nothing ever happened.
Eventually one of them was sent forward, ducking through the doors then disappearing off to the side to keep out of the line of fire. He crept forward along the side wall slowly, listening and watching for any sign of the enemy, but he eventually got to the tram without a sign of resistance, and glanced back at his commander standing next to the machine gun on the other side of the doors, who pointed at him to move inside.
Swallowing hard, the man poked his head inside for a split second, expecting to get shot…but nothing happened. He looked again, realizing that the entire tram was empty, save for some crates, one of which sat directly in front of the door with a metal plate on top.
“There’s no one here, just some boxes,” he yelled back to the others.
His commander frowned, then came forward with two other men, stepping through the crack in the doors and carefully walking up behind the first trooper. When he got there he saw that the tram was in fact empty, with a message on top of the crate directly in front of him, written in Chinese.
He picked up the square plate, reading the hand written message scrolled in some type of marker.
A moment later an extra-large stinger grenade exploded, covering the inside of the tram with green splatters, as well as part of the terminal outside, with several of the dots reaching all the way to the security doors. All four men dropped to the ground, stunned into unconsciousness, with the commander dropping the message plate that had been holding the timer trigger down.
The other guards immediately came forward, ready for trouble as they checked on the condition of their commander. One of them picked up the plate, confused, and looked at the sloppily written message on it, now marred by a slew of green paint.
PRESENT FOR YOU
10
When Paul and Jason entered the central lobby of the resort they ran across a trio of guards coming in, halfway across the room from the doors. The men were chatting and lazily carrying their weapons when the Archons quietly slipped into view and mowed them down on the run.
Jason fired an extra shot into one man’s chest as he jumped over him, following Paul out the entrance and around the corner, wasting no time. He kept within two steps of his partner, close enough for support but not so close as to interfere with each other’s firing lines.
Paul led the pair in a zigzag pattern across the level, avoiding the cameras on the elevators and making their way towards one of the stairwells, scouting it from afar. They knew there was a camera on the side hallway that crossed in front of the stairs, but not on the T-spur that they were in. There was no one standing in sight between them and the stairwell, but it was impossible to see whether the horizontal security doors were closed over the top or bottom flights. If they were, they were going to have to quickly divert to their backup plan.
The sound of footsteps from behind prompted a quick glance at each other, with Jason nodding and heading away from the stairs while Paul ran towards them, easing up just before he hit the cross hallway and staying clear of the camera view, stopping a meter short and listening around the blind corners for traffic as he waited.
Meanwhile Jason headed directly for the sound of the footsteps behind them, catching up just in time to see a pair of guards walking into their hallway. He shot the first one to appear in the head, then his momentum brought him around the corner and in front of the second, which he also downed with a pair of shots to the man’s chest who dropped to the ground unconscious, clearing the view behind where Jason saw a third man in the distance, who turned and ran backwards.
He knew he couldn’t let him get away to warn the others, and judged the distance too great to quickly catch him on the run, so he steadied his stance in the hallway and calmed his arms, bringing his rifle up a
nd taking precise aim…then fired more than a dozen distance shots.
The low gravity assisted his targeting, keeping the stingers aloft far longer than they would have been on Earth. Several of them still missed though, but enough connected to take him down, with the man bouncing slightly on impact then rolling over like a limp doll in the middle of the hallway.
That was the best Jason could hope for…maybe a minute or two before someone found him. More time than they would have had had he let him run off and raise an alarm. Jason double timed it back around the corner and down to Paul’s position.
“Doors are open,” he commented over their private comlink as he caught up.
“Go,” Jason prompted when he was still several meters away.
Paul didn’t hesitate and jumped across the hall into the ascending half of the staircase and pounded his way up, taking three stairs with each step. Jason followed, appearing on the security cameras for a brief instant as he crossed the main hallway, then he too was racing up the stairs heading for level 1 and hoping all the security doors were and stayed open until they got there.
Straight, left U-turn.
Ascend, left U-turn.
Straight, left U-turn.
Ascend, left U-turn.
Straight…into descending guard.
Paul barely had any forewarning before he ran into the assault rifle-toting soldier as he was walking around the bend in the stairs, coming down from an upper level. Not enough time to fire, but he did have just enough time to bring his left elbow up and slam the man out of the way against the wall as he ran through/over him and continued upwards.
