He was letting Liles tend to her injuries. Ash didn’t know what to think of that. She couldn’t do much thinking at all.
“Ash… you… ear?” Liles asked.
She focused on her team lead, guessed at what he was saying, and shook her head. He brushed her hair back from her face then dripped a thick, stinging liquid into her ears, the left one first, then the right.
“Give it… minutes,” Liles said.
Ash nodded, and one breath at a time, she slowed her heart rate and centered her mind. She was an anomaly. She would get through this. A recent booster was still in her system. She had another one stored in a pocket of her combat pants, but she wouldn’t need it if she could just calm down.
Something popped and crackled. Ash jerked into a crouch when a ceiling panel crashed down. The whole station shook, and the lights, which had somehow remained functioning after the first explosion, went out. The corridor plunged into darkness.
“Time to move out.” Rykus’s order didn’t tug at the loyalty training enough to make Ash rise. Her crouch turned into a pain-filled hunch. She’d moved too fast.
Liles wrenched her to her feet. More pain, this time so potent her stomach cramped and twisted. Her legs barely worked, and something wet soaked the back of her head.
She stumbled, almost taking Liles down.
“Up, Ash,” he ground out. “Our transport’s gone, and the station is taking fire.”
“Taking fire?” Ash gasped out. “From who?”
“Cross fire. The Sariceans brought in their prototype. They have two warships in near-space that are trying to take out the Kaelais before the rest of the Fleet can get here.”
Lights glowed up ahead. They were heading away from the station’s outer corridor. That shouldn’t have been possible. Emergency measures should have kicked in, dropping blast doors in an attempt to protect the inner core. Must have been a malfunction or a side effect of the station being in maintenance mode. Whatever the reason, Ash wasn’t complaining. She recognized the pops and crackles behind them now. More breach-foam was deploying to fill weaknesses in the hull. Outside forces were tearing Ysbar Station apart.
“Wait,” Ash said, her mind finally clearing enough to assess their situation. “The Sariceans blew our transport?”
“Yes,” Liles said. “We’re heading for the command deck. We have to find another way off this station.”
Ash gripped his arm. “The prime. The Sariceans have the prime.”
Ahead, Rykus slowed, then turned. “She’s alive?”
“Avesti’s men took her.” She pushed away from Liles and stood on her own.
Mandell cursed. “Of course it couldn’t be the bastard she made a deal with.”
Of course not. Ash looked at Rykus. “We have to save her, don’t we?”
Rykus didn’t have to answer the question. That was the mission: escort Tersa to and from Ysbar Station. If they didn’t have Tersa, they didn’t have a successful mission.
“They have a head start,” Liles said. “We won’t catch them before they reach their shuttle.”
“Command deck,” Rykus said. “If we can make it there first, we might be able to remotely disable the docking tube hatches. It will buy time.”
Liles moved into position to help Ash again, but she put her hand on his chest, keeping him away. “Help Hauch. I’m good.”
She wasn’t good, but they made better time. The station’s groans and vibrations provided one hell of an incentive to ignore her injuries and move her feet. So she concentrated on her fail-safe’s back. He took the lead, setting a quick, silent jog. Every step hurt, but she wouldn’t complain. She wouldn’t show weakness.
No fear. No failure.
The station clanked and popped again. Emergency lights flickered and died. Their night vision goggles were fried from the bio-dampener overload along with their comm-cuffs. All they had were snap-lights to brighten the eerily silent corridors. They made them obvious targets, but if the Sariceans were halfway intelligent, they’d be hauling ass to the nearest bucket off this station.
Too bad that’s exactly where Ash and her team hoped to end up.
Rykus had been a soldier his entire adult life. He’d learned how to compartmentalize his worries and fear, how to concentrate on the job and not think about what-ifs. None of those strategies were working now. He could barely focus on their mission; all he could think about was the way Ash had looked when they’d found her.
She hadn’t been breathing. Rykus had injected her with the liquid O2. It bought him time to get her heart started again. When she’d jerked awake and gasped in a lungful of air, he’d almost broken down. He’d lost people before. It always damaged his confidence. But losing Ash would damage his soul.
She had no idea how close she’d come to death. If she hadn’t been an anomaly…
Once he’d felt her heartbeat, he’d let her go. Let Liles take over. But now he was aware of her behind him. He needed to get her off this damn space station.
He kept ears and eyes open for the Sariceans. The soldiers they’d been fighting while Ash and Hauch took the prime to the transport had pulled back and run when the explosion hit. While it would have been nice to believe they’d abandoned the fight completely, Rykus wasn’t betting on it.
He needed to get the team to the command deck. Not only was there the possibility of slowing down the Sariceans’ departure, but they could contact the Kaelais. Furyk needed to know they weren’t on the transport when it blew. The captain could send another small craft to recover them, and if he’d followed through on his plan and drifted closer to the station, maybe it wouldn’t take a half hour for it to arrive.
Rykus pushed open an ornate swinging door and led them into a large dining hall. They were far enough away from the damaged side of the station that the lights were working again. Chandeliers glittered above tables draped with white cloths and black, triangular plates. In front of the larger of the room’s two bars, half a dozen serving bots sat idle but ready. If a line of thin red emergency light hadn’t been flashing along the baseboards, it would have looked like the restaurant was only minutes from opening, not waiting for guests who would never arrive.
Rykus glanced at his comm-cuff for the fiftieth time before remembering it wasn’t working. He wanted a map. He hated leading the team based on his memory. The only reason he had some confidence he was taking them on the quickest route was because Ash, whose visual memory was almost flawless, would have stopped him if he’d made a wrong turn.
At least he thought she’d stop him. She kept up without complaint, but she was hurt. Blood soaked the back of her head, and her jaw was swollen and bruised. She likely had a concussion. She definitely had burns and serious abrasions. She and Hauch both needed a good stay in a med-bay.
They left the dining hall behind them. Not too much farther now. The serene music gave him hope the command deck was functional and—
A movement to the left. A gunshot.
The bullet hit his armored chest. His feet flew out from under him. He landed hard on his back, rolled, and found cover in a closet crisscrossed with pipes.
Trident Team returned fire. Ash and Liles took cover behind a water tank, but Hauch—
Hauch was flat on the ground.
Rykus got his feet under him, was about to make a sprint for the other soldier, but a yell from Mandell tore through the air. The young soldier ran toward Hauch.
Rykus cursed, then rose to his knees and provided cover fire.
They both made it.
Rykus grabbed Hauch’s battle vest and used it to prop him against the wall. “You alive?”
“Yes, sir,” came Hauch’s strained reply.
“Mandell?”
“Yes, sir.” Mandell moved to the edge of the closet and got into a position to return fire.
Rykus took a closer look at their situation. The Sariceans had launched a messy attack. Poorly executed. If they’d chosen a different location, they might have been able to take t
he team out. As it was, they just succeeded in slowing them down and pissing them off.
He thought he heard Ash yell. He was in a bad location to catch sight of her, but he fired off several shots, peered out to where she and Liles had taken cover.
Only Liles was there.
Damn it, Ash.
He would have seen her body if she’d been killed. She wasn’t anywhere in sight, and the only possible out-of-sight place she could have gone was back through the corridor they’d arrived from.
He clenched his teeth. Of course she wouldn’t stay hunkered down behind the water tank. Anomalies were brainwashed into completing the mission no matter the cost; they didn’t have time to waste here methodically picking off the enemy.
Cold. He had to be cold. Stop caring. Stop feeling. At least until they got off this death trap.
“We have to brim them,” he said.
Mandell ducked back into the safety of the closet. “Brim them? Even with just the incendiary, the station won’t hold.”
“It will have to,” he said.
He took out one cylinder of Brim-4. It was a light, demure-looking green and blue. He broke off the blue part and tossed it behind him—it wouldn’t explode without the dispersed charge.
“Thermal shields,” Rykus yelled.
That received a curse from Liles, but the soldier pulled the shield free from the gear on his back. Mandell covered Hauch, then grabbed his own shield. The thin, reflective blankets could withstand a thousand-degree heat for ten minutes. Brimfire burned closer to twelve hundred for a full minute. The math was almost right.
Gritting his teeth, he set a timer for three seconds, launched the incendiary at the enemy, then wrapped himself in his own thermal shield and hoped his ass didn’t get cooked.
His ears popped. A sudden and suffocating heat pressed down all around him. Beneath the shield, it felt like he’d stuck his head inside the mouth of a fire-breathing dragon. Its saliva burned his skin. Its roar battered his body. Its talons dug into his flesh and pulled it apart one millimeter at a time until, suddenly, the claws retracted. With an almost innocent little ripple, the pressure beating him down disappeared.
He jerked off the thermal shield, drew a burning hot breath into his lungs. Then, after a count of five, he pushed off the ground.
“Status?” His mouth was so dry the question barely made a sound, but he got answering grunts from the team. They’d survived. The stench of burnt flesh told him the enemy had not.
They were slow getting to their feet, but they pushed through the pain and the overwhelming exhaustion. The heat had zapped their energy, and the air felt coarse and thin.
He turned to Liles. “Did Ash say where she was going?”
The soldier wiped sweat from his reddened face. “Said she might be able to get to the command deck another way.”
“I’ll go after her. You three, head straight to the docking tubes. We’ll be there within ten minutes. If we’re not and you have the opportunity to free the prime and get the hell out of here, you take it. Understood?”
They didn’t like it, but they delivered their “yes, sirs” like professional soldiers. The odds of rescuing Tersa diminished with every second that passed, but they would do everything they could do make this cursed mission a technical success. None of them were wired to admit defeat.
27
Ash had been right. The Sariceans had deliberately kept them pinned down. They could have pressed their advantage of numbers and driven Ash’s team back except they didn’t want them to retreat. The reason why was struggling against her captors thirty meters away.
Well, Tersa had been struggling. One of the Sariceans pressed a gun to her temple. The prime lifted her chin and met his eyes but stopped trying to jerk free. Tersa must have heard the battle and called for help. That yell had been what pulled Ash farther away from her team, but now she was one soldier armed with one nonlethal pulse-pistol with one last battery pack that was quickly running out of charge. She couldn’t take down the six enemy soldiers, not without them hurting or killing the prime.
Keep to the plan, she told herself. Get to the command deck, disable the docking tubes, contact the Kaelais. Then she could regroup with her team.
Tersa’s safety was the mission objective. It was hard to let her go, but Ash crouched beside the doorway and remained still and silent as the Sariceans led her away. An expansive view of Ysbarian space lay behind them. It was designed to look like nothing separated the station from the universe outside, but cracks and holes in the massive wall screen ruined the illusion. The Kaelais hovered out there, engaged in a fight with two Saricean warships. The rest of both fleets would be moving into near-space to join the battle, either with the goal to crush the enemy or to simply rescue the Kaelais and capsule out. The latter would leave Tersa and Trident Team dead or in enemy hands.
As soon as the Sariceans were out of sight, Ash advanced into the chamber. A staircase rose above the empty lounge area the enemy had passed through. Ash ignored the sharp pain in her back and chest and sprinted up the steps. She knew where they led: the station’s command deck.
By the time she reached the top, her lungs strained for air and nausea twisted through her stomach. God, she was slow. Weak. But she didn’t have a choice except to keep going. She would endure whatever she had to in order to preserve and protect the Coalition. Right now that required her to prevent the Sariceans from leaving the station with the prime.
The doors to the command deck were wide open and inviting. Gripping her pistol between her hands, she took a steadying breath, then pivoted inside.
It was empty, quiet, dark. She stepped over the threshold, then hit the keypad to close the doors. That would give her a short warning if someone tried to enter.
Holstering her pistol, she moved to the central data-station. She should be able to do what she needed to from it. First: lock the docking clamps on the Sariceans’ shuttle.
It took longer than she liked to bring the station online and convince it that she had authority to access whatever the hell she wanted. She might not have gotten in at all if there hadn’t already been several nonroutine breaches in its security. The log said most had happened almost twenty hours ago. That was when the Sariceans had broken their agreement and sent soldiers to lie in wait for them. This was an old, civilian station that had catered to prominent scientists and astrologers; it didn’t like being accessed by the Saricean military any more than it liked being accessed by the Coalition. So the breaches had occurred, and Ash was able to ride one of them into its systems.
She locked and disabled the docking clamps on the Sariceans’ shuttles, then she searched security vids until she found the corridor where she’d left her team. Charred bodies littered the ground. Brim-4. Likely thrown by her team. They’d be on the move toward the Sariceans’ transport now. She wanted to be on the way there, but she needed to do one more little thing first.
“Ashdyn to the Kaelais. Do you copy?”
She sent the transmission two more times before she realized it was bouncing back with a threat designation. Since it came from an enemy space station, the Kaelais wouldn’t let the data into her system without quarantining it. With the ship and her crew obviously occupied with staying alive right now, it could be a while before the transmission was deemed safe.
Ash didn’t have a while. She tapped on the screen to record a message.
The system bumped her out. That was weird.
A screen to Ash’s left flashed on. Teal stared back at her.
“You look like shit,” the crypty said. Before Ash could reply, she called out, “Captain. I’ve got contact.”
Furyk moved into view behind Teal.
“Good job.” He put his hand on the crypty’s shoulder. “Status?”
“All alive, sir,” Ash said. “The Sariceans have the prime, but we intend to get her back. If it goes well, we’ll be leaving on a Saricean transport. It would be nice if you don’t put a missile in it.”
&nbs
p; “Understood.” Furyk glanced away from the camera, but his hand remained on Teal’s shoulder. It lingered too long to be a simple good-job pat. Interesting.
The hand dropped when he looked back at the camera. “I’ll send predators to cover you. They’ll escort you to the main Fleet. Furyk out.”
Ash glanced at the display showing the conflict that was occurring in the station’s near-space. The Kaelais appeared to be holding up well against the Sariceans’ prototype and the heavy weaponry of its Saber-class warship, but the real problem was the two approaching fleets. Both had left their capsules safely behind and were aiming to join the fight. It was a race to see which one would reach the battle first, a race it looked like the Coalition would lose. The Kaelais was taking a good amount of damage, but if Furyk retreated, he’d be abandoning the prime and Trident Team.
Ash drew her pistol and headed to the exit. She tapped the keypad beside the doors, waited until they slid open.
The barrel of a Saricean gun swung into view. She raised her pulse-pistol, took aim without slowing.
No!
Her hand hitched up as she pulled the trigger. Rykus hunched down, and somehow her shot missed.
“God, Rip.” She lowered her weapon and grabbed him. Or he grabbed her. She wasn’t sure, but they both checked each other for holes.
“I almost killed you,” he said. “What were you thinking, Ash?”
He pulled her into his arms. Her heart hammered inside her chest, an overreaction maybe. Her pistol wouldn’t have killed him; it would have just knocked him out temporarily.
“I saw the prime,” Ash said, forcing herself to push away from him. “I locked the docking clamps. We’re not far behind.”
He took her hand and pulled her along. “Liles and Mandell are on it. We’ll approach from the side.”
The Sariceans looked ragged when she and Rykus crept up on them. Ash didn’t have much charge left in her pulse-pistol, but she didn’t need it. One by one, the surviving Sariceans went down. Damn, her teammates were ace marksmen.
Shades of Honor (An Anomaly Novel Book 2) Page 25
