“Of course,” came the NAI’s reply.
“This is a two-person craft, so I am going to need your help,” he said.
“You wish me to use the weapons while you steer?” Minerva said through his earpiece.
“No, you’re the one with the maps, which I trust you have been updating as I have been sprinting through this maze,” Jennings pointed out. “Besides, I’d rather do the shooting.”
“As you wish, captain,” Minerva said.
“Alright then. Let’s cut a path to the crew,” he said enthusiastically.
8
Anastasia Petrova swore so violently that Vosler took a step back from her. They were still standing in the entrance to the mine, the lift directly behind them, three men in front of them crouching behind makeshift barricades. The rest of her men were scouring the mining tunnels with skimmers, looking for the girl.
“Damn that man!” she swore. “I may kill him myself rather than give him to Santelli. The satisfaction of strangling that man vould be vorth foregoing the profit,” she spat.
“At your discretion,” Vosler said. “But I’m going to have to insist that you head back to the ore processing center.”
“Vhat?” she demanded.
“Jennings is coming for us,” he said. “I can capture or kill him, but I can’t do so and protect you at the same time.”
“Vhat makes you think I need protection?” she demanded.
Vosler braced himself for the tongue lashing he was about to receive. “Anastasia, you are fiercely brave and no one doubts your… tenacity.” He cleared his throat slightly. “But you’re not a soldier. This is not a criminal that might fire a few potshots in your direction. Jennings was a military officer and one of the finest ones I have ever seen in action.”
“You fought vith him?” Petrova asked, her brow furrowing.
“In the war,” Vosler said with a slight nod. “Now, I have to kill him. And you need to head up the lift.”
Petrova crossed her arms and turned back to one of the men manning the barricade. “Vhat’s the status of our skimmers?” she demanded.
One man turned to look at her. “They are making fast work of exploring the tunnels even with one down,” he said. “They should find the girl soon.”
“Very vell,” she said as she walked past Vosler and into the lift. She turned on her heel as the steel gates clanged shut in front of her. “Keep me apprised,” she ordered as the lift began its ascent.
9
Michelle swiveled on her stool nervously and watched her two defenders continuing to work to make their position more defensible. They had managed to pull the wooden bar to block one tunnel and had dragged over several mine carts to serve as cover if Petrova’s men came out of the tunnels to their right. The tunnel behind them went deep into the mine, and there was no way for Petrova’s men to get there without going through the cavern in which they now stood. It was also serving as their only escape egress if their positions got overrun.
A strange sound like an engine revving suddenly caught her attention, and she looked over to the others to see if they heard it. Fix looked up from where he was checking the charge on a large automatic plasma gun with a long clip and a secondary handle for his off-hand.
“Which one?” he asked of no one in particular as he readied the weapon and started pointing it toward the different tunnels.
“Hard to tell,” Lafayette muttered as he set down the sandwich he had somehow made out of the rations they had brought with him. Grabbing his own rifle, he primed the charge on it and started tracking from tunnel opening to tunnel opening.
“What is it?” Michelle demanded.
“Get behind the barricade!” Lafayette ordered as he took up position behind the bar.
Michelle grabbed the small pistol that Jennings had given her and yanked it out of her belt as she crouched behind the bar.
“You’ve got to prime it,” Fix muttered next to her as he set down the rifle and picked up a pump-action plasma cannon that fired explosive rounds. “Button on the back. Might want to take the safety off too.”
She flicked the button that turned the safety off and pressed her thumb on the primer. The gun suddenly felt alive in her hands as it powered up, emitting a soft whirring noise as it did so.
“Skimmers, you think?” Lafayette asked.
“Aye,” Fix answered.
“Venture 2600 DXCs,” Squawk announced as he too took cover behind the bar, his own rifle looking strange and out of place in his hands.
“They have shields?” Lafayette asked before interjecting, “Wait, you can tell what kind they are just from the sound?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“Not good,” Fix muttered.
“Do we head down the escape tunnel?” Michelle asked, throwing a look to the large black maw behind them.
“If they have skimmers, we’ll never outrun them,” Lafayette answered as he tightened the grip on his gun. “Get ready. Here they come.”
10
Jennings depressed the trigger and sent a spout of blue energy racing down the tunnel ahead of him. “Minerva! Go evasive!” he shouted as he saw a missile streaking in his direction.
Minerva, who Jennings had given full control of the steering to, sent the skimmer banking around the circular tunnel’s walls as they continued speeding recklessly toward one of Petrova’s skimmers. The missile rushed past as Minerva sent the skimmer looping around in a full circle around the ceiling and back to the floor, Jennings firing the entire time.
The skimmers continued racing at each other, both firing, both sets of shields holding, and Jennings found his lips forming a grim smile. “Hold course, Minerva,” he said.
“This is unwise,” came the reply in his ear.
“Hold course!” he shouted.
“I calculate only a forty-seven percent chance of this succeeding,” she replied calmly. “Five seconds to impact.”
Petrova’s men swerved to avoid the impact, trying to pass him by climbing the wall. Jennings quickly redirected his shields so that all power was directed precisely at the enemy skimmer. The shields of the two vessels smashed off each other and the enemy skimmer bounced hard off Jennings’ shields, smashed into the roof of the cavern and then rolled over several times, its repulsors failing, before it crashed into the ground and exploded.
“Nicely done,” Minerva’s voice said in his ear.
“Nice driving,” he replied. “How did you know that we could turn this thing upside down like that?”
“I calculated a sixty-seven percent chance based on the craft’s specifications, the local gravity, and the velocity at which we were traveling,” Minerva responded calmly.
“That’s reassuring,” he responded. “We need to get to the…”
Jennings was interrupted by a salvo of fire coming from the right hand most of several tunnels in another interchange. Two more skimmers raced out from that tunnel, and Jennings felt Minerva accelerate down a new corridor, his sensors confirming that the skimmers were following him. More fire splashed off his shields and he checked their power: forty-two percent and falling. He wasn’t going to last much longer.
The tunnel Minerva was guiding them down had a lot of curves and a lot of intersections, so they were able to keep far enough ahead of the enemy skimmers to prevent them from getting a missile lock. Jennings knew he could not lead them on a merry chase, however. Sooner or later, he was going to run into a dead-end or get splashed, and besides he was supposed to be making his way back to the others to help them out.
“Minerva, do you have any idea where you are taking us?” he asked as the shields took another hit and she turned the skimmer hard to the right and then immediately turned left.
“I am attempting to navigate a circuitous route so that we might lose our trails, but this has only a twenty-two percent change of succeeding,” she said.
“Great,” Jennings muttered.
“There is more bad news,” she announced as the skimmer dove in
to a downward sloping tunnel and then swung to the left.
“This gets worse?” he replied with as much sarcasm as he could muster.
Another blast from behind stole his attention for a moment, so that he could not hear Minerva’s response. He activated the rear camera on his HUD and swiveled the cannons so they were facing aft. He fired some scattering shots, hoping to slow down his pursuers, but he did not hit much. It was hard to target when he was not in control of the direction that the skimmer was going.
“Say again, Minerva,” he said as they swerved once more and he lost sight of his targets.
“I calculated the longest possible variable route, but we are about to encounter several problems,” she said.
“What problems?” he demanded.
“In sixty-two seconds, we will enter a long straightaway,” she explained. “Our pursuers will have almost a full minute with which to attack us.”
“We won’t survive that,” he pointed out.
“There are no alternatives,” she said. “Also, the straightaway leads directly to where Angus Ferguson, Remy Lafayette, Michelle Williams, and Squawk are hiding.”
“So, I’m about to die and I’m leading the enemy to my crew?” he demanded. “Wonderful.”
“Entering straightaway in fifteen seconds,” Minerva reported, her voice suddenly sounding too sweet for Jennings’ liking.
The skimmer shot into the straightaway, a long tunnel whose end Jennings could not see. He knew he would only have a few moments before Petrova’s men had a clear shot at him. His shields were no longer strong enough to survive even a few more solid blasts of plasma cannon fire, let alone a direct shot from a rocket. No sooner had that thought passed through his mind than Jennings thought to his own rockets in the nose of the skimmer. There was not enough time to wheel about and fire, but there was enough time to throw up a road block. Switching the targeting on the rockets to manual, he aimed the launcher at the ceiling just as Petrova’s skimmers roared into the tunnel behind him. Jennings fired, and the rockets detonated just in front of him in the ceiling. As the skimmer shot past the falling debris, he fired again and again until the rocket launcher was empty.
In the rear view display on his HUD, he could see the tunnel ceiling collapsing in a pile of rocks, timber and dust. Two fireballs joined the collapse a moment later as Petrova’s two skimmers crashed into the rubble.
“That worked out rather nicely,” Jennings observed.
“Against all probabilities,” Minerva responded.
“All right, let’s get the rest of the crew and get the hell out of here,” he said. “Petrova’s got to be running short of bad guys by now.”
11
The first skimmer sent a missile into their cavern before it was even in sight, sailing well above Michelle’s head and detonating against the far wall, but still managing to shower all of them with bits of rock, forcing them to duck their heads behind the bar. Before they were able to bring their weapons back up in a defensive position, two skimmers were in the room, hovering side-by-side in a tunnel egress, and a second rocket blew apart the roof of the tunnel that was supposed to be their escape route, causing a cave-in.
Fix was the first to open fire, sending explosive rounds into the shields of the nearest skimmer. The blasts knocked the shields out and Lafayette opened fire with his rifle and two of the three men in the skimmer were taken down. The third man jumped out of the way and threw his body behind the skimmer, using it for cover, as the driver of the second skimmer moved his vehicle in between them, allowing its shields to cover him.
The gunner on the second skimmer opened fire at the barricade, targeting Fix. The skimmer had enough firepower to rip through the barricade easily, but they were specifically trying to take Michelle alive. Fix rolled down to a new location behind the bar, leapt up and fired. His move had been anticipated by the skimmer gunner, and a blast of energy tore the barricade up in front of Fix, who was thrown backward, his weapon clattering on the ground.
“Fix!” Lafayette roared.
He leapt to his feet, pouring fire into the second skimmer’s shields, screaming curses in French. He did not notice in time the lone survivor from the first skimmer jump to his feet and lob a cylindrical metallic object over the barricade. As the object tumbled in the air toward them, Lafayette drew a bead on the man who threw it and blasted him backwards.
The cylinder clanged off the floor and then there was a light so bright that Michelle could no longer see anything, even after the light faded. She smelled something noxious and began coughing violently. She could hear Lafayette and the Pasquatil Squawk doing the same.
Michelle heard the sound of boots falling on rocks near her and she clumsily held the pistol, desperate for her vision to return and give her a target to shoot at. There was the sound of one shot, and she heard Lafayette cry out in pain and fall to the ground. It was followed up by the sound of a boot meeting a small body and the slamming of someone into the barrier they had erected. She heard Squawk let out a whimper, and Michelle let loose a roar of fury. It almost instantly died in her throat as she felt something hard and heavy come down on her head, and everything went black.
12
Matthew Jennings emerged from the straightaway tunnel into the crossroads where he had ordered his crew to meet him and he immediately felt his heart seize in his throat. One of the tunnels was collapsed, the bar that had been used as a barricade had been shot to pieces, smoke still hung in the air, and two bodies lay behind the barricades. He leapt off the skimmer and raced over to Fix, who was the nearest.
“Fix?” he demanded as he fell to his knees.
“They got her, Cap’n,” he said weakly, blinking some blood out of his eyes. “Go get her.”
“What about you?” Jennings asked.
“Mild concussion and a few cuts,” he replied. “Be fine once the room stops spinning.”
“Marquis?” Jennings demanded, throwing a look through the smoke to his first mate.
“Shot and bleeding,” came a weak, squeaky voice that he recognized as Squawk’s.
Jennings left Fix and raced over to where Squawk was hovering over Lafayette. “Merde, it hurts, mon capitaine,” Lafayette said. “But it’s just my shoulder. Fix is right. Go get the girl, mon ami. We’ll be right behind you.”
Nodding, Jennings spun about and raced back to the skimmer, leapt into the pilot’s seat, and ordered Minerva to get him to the mine entrance as quickly as possible. Jennings rocketed past an abandoned skimmer that he assumed had belonged to the three dead men who lay around it.
“Minerva, I need a time to target,” Jennings said as the skimmer accelerated down the tunnel and he started tapping furiously on the weapons console.
“Two minutes nineteen seconds,” she replied. “There is a high statistical probability that a rear guard would have been left in the mine entranceway.”
“Well aware of that, Minerva,” he replied.
“May I ask your intent?” she asked calmly.
“I’m turning this into a bomb,” he replied as he continued in the process of setting the skimmer’s plasma cannons to overload.
“One minute thirty seconds,” Minerva advised as they rounded a corner and the tunnel turned into a straightaway and headed in an upward trajectory. Jennings continued to work. “Forty-five seconds.”
“Got it,” he said just before they emerged from the tunnel into the mine entrance.
Three men were waiting behind cover and they immediately opened fire on him. His shields were still strong enough, although barely, to fend off the attack. There was no sign of Michelle or anyone else in the entrance as Jennings raced toward Petrova’s men. At the last moment, he flicked a button that dropped his shields and threw himself off the back of the skimmer. His body bounced and rolled across the cavern floor just as the skimmer crashed into the bounty hunters’ cover and the weapons system overloaded. The explosion threw all three men back into the cavern wall in a varying number of pieces. The force of
the blast pushed Jennings across the floor until he slammed into the wall, his breath knocked out of him.
Moving slowly, he pulled himself to his feet and forced himself over to the lift. The large elevator was still moving upwards, lumbering slowly. Michelle could still be on it, he thought to himself. It had taken a few minutes for their descent into the mine- he might still have time.
To do what, he wondered to himself. Glancing around desperately, he spied the large room where the conveyor belt that ran from the mine to the ore processing center was. Moving as fast as he was able, despite the numerous bruises, aches and pains that were plaguing his body, Jennings made it to the room and hit a large green button in a console that was next to a large upward sloping tunnel with a conveyor belt. The conveyor roared to life and Jennings let loose a cry of triumph as he jumped onto it.
13
Vosler was extremely thankful that this job was over. They had lost dozens of men, thousands of dollars worth of equipment and he was pretty certain that Petrova was about to lose it. He looked over at the semi-conscious Michelle Williams slumped in between two tall bounty hunters who were carrying her. She had better be worth it, he thought to himself.
“Vosler to Petrova,” he said into his comm.
“Go ahead,” came the reply.
“We have the girl,” he said. “We’re in the lift, about to exit now.”
“I had to head back…” she began, but was interrupted by the chime of the elevator arriving at the ore processing station and the door sliding open.
“Surprise, motherfucker!” Jennings shouted as he opened fire with the eight barrel plasma cannon he carried.
No one else had a chance to react as he poured fire into the elevator, keeping the stream of plasma bolts at a height that would not hit Michelle. In just a few moments, all of Vosler’s men were dead, and Vosler had been hit in his chest armor and in his exposed arm and shoulder. The impact of the blast had sent him flying into the back of the lift, and he had slammed his head against the metal wall. He only barely registered Jennings walking into the elevator and picking up the now stirring Michelle Williams.
111 Souls (Infinite Universe) Page 22
