That was why she had taken such a hard line on Matthew Jennings. He had proved himself to be a fly in the ointment on several occasions, but Petrova was pursuing him with a vendetta suited only for a cold, cruel Russian, even if she was several generations removed from the Siberian wastes. Jennings in his own way had dared to defy her: taking commissions that should have been hers, working jobs successfully where she had failed, forcing her to take marks from him in order to collect the bounty she believed she was entitled to. Not dealing with Jennings herself and waiting for Ounimbango and the TGF was a slight on her honor. And not even her unshakable lust for money rivaled her need for honor.
The lift rumbled to a stop and they exited along with another four of her men. Vosler observed those that they had brought and found himself grimacing. These were no soldiers they had with them. They were all hired guns and bounty hunters, maybe a few who had put some time in with the military during the war, but they were not the professional caliber they needed for this type of mission. Rather than securing the perimeter and the multiple entrances and exits to the main room, they were huddled together in groups of four and five, chatting or swiveling their heads around, barely even looking for a threat. These men were too used to the quarry only running, Vosler realized. They were not ready for one that was going to fight back.
The thoughts was barely in his head for a moment when he glanced up and saw a spiral of black and green flying through the air. Something was strangely familiar about it. Just as it landed, recognition took hold of him and he dived into Petrova knocking them both back into the lift.
“Grenade!” he roared just as the explosion rocked the subterranean cavern.
A cloud of dust and smoke filled the room, but even through it and the chaos of the explosion still ringing in his ears, Vosler could see the unmistakable flashes and hear the roar of plasma cannons ripping through those men that were still standing. He would have returned fire, but there would have been no point. In the smoke, he had no way to find his target and even more, the firing had already stopped. Their ambusher was already gone.
Vosler pulled himself to his feet slowly, knocking the dust and rubble from his clothing, and then extended a hand down to Petrova. She had a small gash in her forehead, but she did not appear any else the worse for wear.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Furious,” she responded. “But my vounds vill heal.” She grimaced as she tried to take a step forward and then allowed herself to fall back to the ground. “I’m a little dizzy,” she reported. “Find out how bad it is. How many ve lost. Then secure a perimeter with anyone ve have left. I don’t vant any more surprises.”
“Of course,” he said before he left to go see how many survived and help tend to the wounded.
He immediately ordered anyone still standing and unhurt to take up sentry positions in the main corridors. As the smoke was cleared by the station’s air processing system, he was able to take stock of how bad it was. Captain Jennings had killed eight in his attack, most of them with the grenades, although two bodies had been ripped apart by precision fire. There was also a half-dozen injuries, not counting the numerous scrapes, cuts and other random bleeds that most of those still standing had. Their corpsman had been one of those killed, so Vosler looked to the wounded as best as he could. Two he could tell were going to die, but the others seemed likely to recover if they got back to the ship. One even stated he was good enough to carry on, picked up his weapon and joined the other sentries. Petrova had found her balance and was walking slowly over toward him. The same steely look of determination was on her face, and Vosler shook his head slightly. As determined as she was, she kept underestimating Captain Jennings. That unfortunate habit was going to get them all killed.
“Vosler,” she said quietly.
“Yes, Ms. Petrova,” he answered.
“Call the Vistula,” she ordered. “Tell them to send someone over with the skimmers.”
Vosler looked at the height of the tunnels and their width, and felt a smile come over his face. “The skimmers, ma’am, aye,” he said as he pulled a comm unit off his belt and prepared to make the call.
6
It felt like they had been running for days when Lafayette at last called a break, and Michelle fell to one knee trying to catch her breath. She had lettered in three varsity sports and had jogged every day, or did until she got caught up in this mess, and she had never felt so out of shape before. Fix was barely breaking a sweat and Lafayette was not gasping for air the way she was, and he was fairly old and had a bit of a gut to him. Only Squawk seemed to be having the same trouble as she was as little wheezes kept coming from the Pasquatil.
Fix tapped her boot with his. “A break means we walk,” he said.
Annoyed, Michelle pulled herself to her feet and started after them. How they could tell where they were going she had no idea. Maps had never been one of her strong points and the environment in the mines never changed. The roof was too low, the walls were timbered, and the ground was smoothed over rock with a pair of rail tracks running through it. Occasionally, they turned left or right into another tunnel, somehow knowing that this was the correct one and not the other dozen they had passed.
“We’re almost to the rendezvous,” Lafayette said.
“Hooray,” Michelle muttered sarcastically.
All the same, she felt a little better when the tunnel emerged into some kind of transfer station. There was a roundabout for the mine cars and a half dozen new tunnels leading in different directions. Unbelievably enough, cut into the rock face was a small bar with Rockhead’s Roadhouse stenciled in crude white letters on the rock above. There were a half dozen stools bolted into the ground and it looked like there had once been tables on a raised bit of stone near the bar. Gratefully, Michelle sat on one of the stools, feeling the aches in her legs lessen slightly.
“I never would have thought there’d be a cantina inside the mine,” Lafayette observed, walking over to the bar and sticking his head over.
“Looks like you picked the wrong line of work,” Michelle observed.
“Merde,” he said, ignoring her for a moment. “They left the stools, took the bottles.” He sat down next to her and said, “No, I don’t think this would’ve been for me even if you’re allowed to mine shitfaced. Really, dat has to be in violation of some kind of labor law.”
“You gonna have a beverage or do you wanna help secure the perimeter?” Fix demanded. The Scotsman had been in an unpleasant mood since his confrontation with Jennings.
“Excusez-moi,” Lafayette said politely as he stood to go help Fix.
“Rocks and stones,” muttered a tired voice to Michelle’s left. She looked down and saw Squawk trying to pull himself up onto a stool without any success.
“Do you want some help?” she asked.
“That would be helpful,” he replied.
Grabbing him under the arms, she hefted the surprisingly heavy engineer onto a stool. “Thankful thanks,” he said and let out a long whistle that could only be the Pasquatil equivalent of a sigh.
“Buy you a drink?” she asked, passing him her canteen. “It’s only water, but I think you’ll like it all the same.”
Squawk nodded his thanks and took a small sip. “A strange place,” he muttered.
“How so?” she asked.
“Big hole in the world,” he said. “Seems pointless.”
“They were digging for something useful, I would imagine,” Michelle said. “Ores, minerals, metals.”
The Pasquatil was clearly not impressed. “If we need it, why is it so far away?” he asked. “If it’s buried, we’re not supposed to have it.”
“That’s an interesting way of looking at it, I suppose,” she said.
“There’s more than one way?” he asked, confused.
“Don’t worry about it,” she replied.
She had never had a conversation with a Pasquatil before, but had heard that many humans found them aggravating- their
insistence on taking everything literally, their inability to grasp when to use synonyms, and their complete indifference toward understanding why things work had driven many an ambassador crazy when humanity first met the Pasquatil. All the same, she found that the wide-eyed amazement he tended to find in the simplest of things amusing. After a few moments rest, he was already hopping over to the roundabout, chattering to himself and occasionally muttering in English on how to improve it.
Here they were about to probably die, and Squawk was still busy trying to improve everything. There was probably a life lesson in that somewhere, Michelle thought.
Her thoughts were interrupted by Lafayette walking back over to her. “We should be safe here for a little while,” he announced. “Did you feel that tremor a moment ago?”
“No,” she replied, honestly not having any idea what he was talking about.
“It was light, barely a tickle,” he replied, “But it was definitely the Captain.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Grenades,” he said as if it were obvious. “The Russian’s in the tunnel, and he just struck the first blow.”
“Let’s hope he walks away from it,” she whispered.
“He will,” Lafayette said. “Dat boy just doesn’t know how to die.”
“Let’s hope that’s a lesson none of us learn here today,” she said.
Nodding solemnly, Lafayette headed back to the roundabout where Fix was trying to set up some kind of barricade. Michelle knew Jennings had picked this as a good location for them to rendezvous, because there were so many different paths they could take from here, but it did not make her feel any better. That just meant there were so many different paths that Fix and Lafayette had to cover.
7
Captain Matthew Jennings was beginning to get worried. His plan of attack had been based on being able to flee into a corridor with so many branching tunnels and passageways that he could very easily get lost. This was a brilliant plan except for the station’s map neglecting to mention that many of the tunnels had collapsed, been caved in or were otherwise impassable. Since he had started running, he had been traveling in what was essentially a straight line, and it would not be difficult for Petrova’s men to know exactly where he was going. Finally, he came to a fork in the pathway and took the rightmost immediately. He was already so off course that his main plan was to be as erratic as possible. Checking the map and figuring out where he was could come after he was certain he wasn’t going to get shot in the back.
The tunnels started to show him more of what he wanted- more branches that were still open. These forks in the road never offered more than one alternate option though, and he kept feeling that there was some kind of weird buzzing sound bouncing off the tunnel walls. It sounded distorted, but mechanical and vaguely familiar though. He turned left at another fork in the tunnel only to arrive at a dead end. Cursing loudly, he pulled up his handheld and checked his location on the map. Sure enough, he was nowhere near where he was supposed to be and would have to go back several tunnels to find a shaft that would lead him eventually to his compatriots.
Tucking the handheld back into its pouch on his belt, he drew his pistol once again. That sound was back, and this time it sounded louder. He heard the telltale roar of a hovercraft engine, and his eyes darted fervently, looking for cover. There was none to be found. His only advantage was that it was dark and that the tunnel he was in had dead-ended about fifty feet after a sharp turn. They wouldn’t see him until they were almost on top of him.
Moving quickly, he ran to the wall at the curve, pulled out the eight barrel rotating plasma cannon and primed it. Listening carefully, he could tell that the skimmer car was about two hundred feet away. One hundred feet. At fifty feet, he tensed his body and prepared to make his move. At twenty-five, he threw his body around the corner of the curve and opened up full with the weapon, its barrel rotating rapidly and spitting green fire in the general direction of the rapidly approaching skimmer. Jennings noted only a few splashes against the light shielding the skimmer carried, but he was not trying to kill anyone on board.
Cries of surprise echoed from the two men on board the skimmer, and the pilot wrenched the stick hard over to avoid the attack, causing the skimmer to bounce off the left hand wall where the wall curved back to the right. The pilot tried to correct again, over-corrected as he attempted to take the curve well, bounced off the right hand wall, then failed to fire the retrorockets as the nose of the skimmer slammed into the cave-in that had walled off the mine tunnel.
As soon as the last sickening crunch of steel and shield hitting rock sounded, Jennings was on his feet, his rifle tracking through the darkness. There was a slight shudder in the space around the skimmer, one of the men aboard had deactivated the shields and the same man dizzily hopped out of the cockpit and then fell to the ground. Jennings could see that his head was bleeding badly and as he moved closer, weapon still at the ready, he saw that the other man in the skimmer was lying back in his seat, his head flopped over on his neck in a grotesque manner, suggest that his neck was broken.
“Oh God,” the wounded man muttered and he reached for a radio comm on his chest.
“Nope,” Jennings said as he fired once hitting the henchman in the hand that was reaching up to the button. “I wouldn’t do that.”
The man cried in pain and grabbed hold of his arm with his other hand. Jennings let go of his rifle, the strap keeping it around his neck, and drew his pistol as he moved towards Petrova’s wounded henchman.
“Ditch the weapon,” Jennings said, indicating the pistol at the men’s belt. “Slowly,” he added.
The man complied and tossed the weapon.
“What’s your name?” Jennings asked.
“Li Bao,” the man responded.
“How many skimmers are there?” he demanded.
“Blow me,” Li responded.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Jennings redirected his pistol aim from Li’s head to his knee and fired. The plasma flashed through his knee ligaments, and Li cried out in pain, his still functioning arm grabbing toward the wounded knee.
“Fuck you!” Li spat with as much venom as he could muster, drool and blood dribbling down his chin.
Jennings clubbed him across the face with the pistol, knocking him flat on his back. Li hit his head on the stone floor of the mine hard, and his eyes rolled back into his head. Kneeling down next to Li, Jennings stuck his fingers into the hole in Li’s knee. Li immediately sprang back to consciousness, his core muscles tightening causing him to burst into a sitting position. Jennings immediately placed his pistol directly against Li’s forehead while keeping his fingers in the man’s knee.
“Last chance,” Jennings warned.
The muscles in Li’s face quaked with tremors as he grit his teeth and tried to deal with the pain that Jennings knew had to be nearly unbearable. “There’s five more,” he spat.
“Was that so hard?” Jennings asked as he removed his fingers from Li’s open wound. “Now, I want to talk to your boss.”
Gingerly, the man reached down to his belt with his one still functioning arm and grabbed the comm unit, which Jennings took without taking his eyes off Li. “Ms. Petrova?” Jennings said into it.
“This is Petrova,” the harsh, accented voice replied. “Tell me that you have something.”
“Oh, I have something all right,” Jennings replied. “One of your men with a gun to his head.”
There was a moment’s pause. “And you think that buys you something?” she demanded.
“I was going to propose a trade,” Jennings said.
“Nothing you have is vorth vhat the girl is vorth to me,” Petrova replied. “No deal.”
“I was just curious to see what value you placed on the lives of your own people,” Jennings said. “I wanted all of your people to know how expendable Mister… What was your name again?”
With the radio extended out to Li’s mouth, the wounded man suddenly barke
d, “We’re in the…”
Jennings fired and Li’s head snapped back, his face melted by the heat of the plasma shot. “Oops,” Jennings said into the radio. “Well, that’s it for Mr. Li and his friend here, Ms. Petrova.”
“You’ll regret this, Captain Jennings,” Petrova’s angry voice responded after a moment’s silence.
“You think so?” Jennings replied as he dropped the radio onto Li’s corpse and headed over to the skimmer.
The skimmer was an open-air vehicle about eight feet long with three seats, one in the front where the controls for steering and auxiliary firing control were located and two in the back where there were consoles for controlling the main weapons systems and the shield system. It looked vaguely like a very large old-fashioned motorcycle except that it had two wings extending out from in between the front and rear seats and was kept in the air by repulsor lifts. Each wing had twin plasma cannons that could be rotated by the gunners. The pilot was protected by a cone of metal and transparent hard plastic shielding that also served as the vehicles’ Heads-up Display. The nose of the small craft contained a small rocket launcher.
Jennings grabbed the collar of the dead pilot and threw him out of the seat. Swinging himself up into it, he then did a quick check on the skimmer’s systems. The shields had taken a bit of a pounding from the skimmer bouncing off the walls, but they had been recharging for the last few minutes and there was no structural damage to the craft.
He connected the portable CPU into a flashport on the skimmer. “Minerva, are you connected?” Jennings asked.
111 Souls (Infinite Universe) Page 21
