Brit and Andy were in a drop ship as part of Fireteam Two, which Transon had decided to send as a mixed deployment of close-attack fighters and three Armadillo Class drop ships with breaching teams.
Fireteam One went in hot. They would complete strafing runs to draw out any remaining close fighters the pirates deployed in response, until Aggression’s Cost had a better picture of their capabilities. Then the breaching teams would burn and brake, landing at assigned points across Object 8221’s circumference in areas intelligence had deemed most likely to serve as habitat on the asteroid.
“They’re going to kill those kids,” a short-haired lieutenant named Arsel sitting across from them complained, staring down the disassembled barrel of her projectile rifle. She held the tube up to the single overhead light then dropped it across her knees to rub the steel with an oiled cloth. It was busy work. Everyone in the small bay was engaged in their own version.
Brit shook her head. “If they were going to kill them, they would have done it when we first hit their long-range scans. They think they can take us. They haven’t tried to run, so that means they’re going to stand and fight.”
“Can they?” Arsel said. “When was the last time we took on a station?”
“It’s an object,” Andy said.
“It’s a fortress in the middle of nowhere,” Arsel countered. “There’s no telling what we’re going to find when we get into that place.” She slid her K-bar knife out of her thigh sheath and turned the black blade in the light. “I don’t care if those kids are dead. Me, I’ll be in corridors cutting throats.”
“Hooah,” someone said down the line without looking up.
Arsel nodded and slid the knife back home.
“I’ll be right behind you,” Brit said. “I’ve got no mercy for child molesters. I just don’t want to end up in some trap only to find out there were never any kids to begin with.”
“The kids are real,” Andy said. He’d been studying Carthage InnerSol, their shipping routes between High Terra, Mercury, Mars and sometimes Cruithne. They were branching out to Jupiter as well. They moved mostly calorie stock, ice, and other food stuffs, playing a tight game with pricing and demand that had a devastating impact on isolated settlements. It looked to him like the pirates had other reasons than ransom to punish CEO Angie Carthage.
Andy set those thoughts aside as extra information. He didn’t have space in his mind right now for moral questions about the citizens they were here to save. Soon enough, he would need to make split-second decisions that would cost lives. He knew if he brought the info up to the rest of them it would only make him look soft. Most of the TSF weren’t interested in humanizing the enemy.
The pilot came over the intercom and said, “Fireteam One has established their base of fire at a stand-off distance of a thousand klicks. We’re cleared for approach. I’m still showing significant point defense weapons and possible remaining attack fighters ready to say hello. Stay buckled in until we’re on surface and I complete the breach.”
“You gonna kiss us goodbye, Dad?” somebody shouted.
“You can kiss my ass on the way out, how’s that?”
Everyone laughed at the bad joke, bleeding off tension. Andy kept his hands on his rifle where it rested between his knees, muzzle pointed at the ceiling. He worked his jaw back and forth, testing his helmet’s motion. He could have logged into Fireteam One’s battle net to get a better sense of the close fight around Object 8221 but he reminded himself again that he didn’t need extra information clouding his thoughts. He glanced at Brit, whose hard blue eyes stared straight ahead. She drummed her fingers on her rifle’s barrel, tapping a boot to some internal rhythm. She kept her jaw clenched, which made her face look angular and hard, almost like a skull.
The ship dropped straight down at least fifty meters, sending Andy’s stomach through his throat. The drop was followed by a hard-braking maneuver that threw him sideways against his seat harness. Scraping noises ran the length of the wall at his back, as if chaff and kinetics were bouncing against the drop ship’s hull.
“It’s hot out there,” the pilot said.
Hard acceleration threw them back in their seats, then weightlessness as the ship’s nose pitched forward and seemed to dive. Andy realized how disoriented he was when the ship abruptly jerked hard and stopped, attached to the surface of Object 8221.
“Took me a little longer to match their delta-v than I thought it would,” the pilot’s scratchy voice explained. “Had a point defense cannon try to strafe us near the end. We’re under their close-in defenses now. I’m starting the plasma torches.”
A low buzzing noise came from the rear of the troop area where the exterior blast doors sat. Andy couldn’t tell if he’d felt or imagined a vibration in his seat as the cutting torches did their work.
Everyone in the bay checked their armor’s seals and looked over the men and women next to them. The Armadillo should make an air-tight seal to the object…but under fire, a blowout was a real possibility.
“You better save my ass before your girlfriend’s, Sykes,” Arsel said as Andy checked over Carser in the seat next to him.
He glanced over to find Arsel staring at him.
She gave him a feral grin. “Maybe I’ll take you back to my bunk when this is over, show you how it’s done. I’ve got something you can hold onto.”
Brit rolled her eyes. “You do what you want to,” she said.
“Oh, yeah?” Arsel asked. She raised her eyebrows in invitation toward Andy. “I thought she’d have a little more fight in her.”
“I’m saving it for what’s out there,” Brit replied.
“Nothing better than fucking after fighting, right Sykes?” Arsel said.
Andy gave her a smirk but didn’t play into the spat. He focused on keeping his mind clear. He imagined the blast doors pulling back, revealing a corridor or maintenance bay. The immediate fire from some inside team. He wrapped his hand around a grenade hanging from his armor’s harness and rubbed the control nubs, feeling them through the thin finger pads on his gloves, memorizing their pattern.
“One minute!” the pilot announced.
The bay filled with the sounds of the breaching team throwing off their seat harnesses and moving into a ready position. Behind him, several soldiers ran their rifles through final function checks. The long beep of a pulse pistol powering up reminded him of his dad’s alarm clock in the morning.
Brit was closer to the door. She didn’t look back at him.
The overhead light switched from white to red and the four successive explosions sounded from the other side of the blast doors. Five more seconds of silence followed as everyone gripped their weapons in the red-tinted dark, until the blast doors slid open.
“Exit!” the pilot barked. “Exit! Off my ship! Ready to depart station.”
The seal was good, but not perfect as air hissed out around the door’s edges. The first two soldiers tossed grenades through the opening and two flash bursts and a cloud of smoke blew back in the bay. Andy slid his face plate down and took a deep breath as his helmet’s respirator switched on automatically. The air tasted like plastic.
In another heartbeat, he was running into the smoke with his rifle up, shifting his attention between the corridor in front of him and the lines taking shape inside his face shield. Flattening against a wall, he crouched and brought his rifle to his shoulder, ready for incoming fire.
The team leaders sent out micro-probes into the air, but bright flashes of light signaled their demise.
“Electronic countermeasures,” Team Two’s leader called out. “Mark I eyeballs only.”
The breach team separated into four bounding teams. Andy was on Team Three. Brit had ended up near the front of the corridor and fell in with Team One.
“Moving!” the Team One leader shouted. In well-practiced formations, they alternated between covering each other and moving down the corridor, waiting at intersections, and then sprinting forward. They didn’t bot
her to clear rooms beyond checking inside, then sealing the doors with a quick lockdown bolt.
The corridors were the typical smooth natural rock cut by boring machines. Conduit and plumbing ran along the ceiling in a suspended basket. One corridor had a planter thick with ivy-like vines running high along a wall. Otherwise the hallways were bare. They appeared to have entered in a section devoted to network management. Most of the rooms were full of nitrogen-cooled quantum computation banks.
“These are some sophisticated pirates,” Andy said. He had expected dirty hallways full of trash and drug paraphernalia like the last raid, when they found rooms full of half-starved kids.
“Do we have a map yet?” his team leader barked.
“I don’t have it,” Andy said. “Based on the intel we had, we should be moving into command areas. Do you have any bio-scan data?”
“Not yet.”
Ahead of them, Brit’s team came under fire. The remaining teams immediately fell into formation and started looking for flanking routes. The corridor was straight with long rooms branching off at regular intervals. The first one they’d reached had been full of what had appeared to be lab equipment; lounges with terminals at their heads, and what looked like helmet-shaped neural monitors.
“You sure this is a pirate base?” someone had asked.
Andy could only shrug. He was worried about Brit, doing his best to remember details as he saw them but also focused on the moment. He continually scanned the corners and doorways were someone might attack from the rear, pop from a ceiling vent, where a chemical or radiological agent might leak out at any moment.
The three enemies Team One had neutralized didn’t look like pirates as Andy passed their bodies and scanned them. They were dressed in uniform black body armor with matching weapons. To Andy, they looked like private security.
They cleared another laboratory area, every console a matching collection of black screens and input devices, devoid of logos or paraphernalia that people usually left on their workstations, like coffee cups or notes. Everything looked either unused, or meticulously scrubbed clean.
He switched over the main battle net to listen in on the other two breaching teams. Their situation reports returned the same confusing observations: unused living areas, empty cafeterias, a hydroponics section full of tomato plants heavy with fruit but no sign of human activity. All three teams were converging on the region intel had identified as the command section. No one expected to find the kids there. They should have already been picked up in one of the living areas.
To Andy, Object 8221 looked less like a pirate base and more like a hidden corporate research site. If that was the case, why would the CEO of the company lead the TSF here? Why not hire her own private security to do whatever she wanted done? Andy stopped himself and signed out of the secondary nets. He needed to stay focused on what was in front of him.
His team had moved to the front of their current corridor and Andy found himself providing overwatch on the soldier moving toward a four-way intersection. He kept his rifle at his shoulder, scanning up and down the hallway for movement beyond the leader. The scout had barely reached the intersection when four drones appeared from the side corridors, fans whirring, and proceeded to pour projectile fire into the open hallway.
Andy hit the floor and fired with one hand while reaching for a grenade with the other. He set the grenade to close-radius explosion and rolled it past where his team leader had fallen against the wall, the armor on his thigh cracked with blood and seeping biofoam.
“Down!” Andy shouted. When he realized his team leader wasn’t responding, he sprinted forward and threw himself on top of the wounded soldier just as the grenade went off under the drones. He felt first a spray of bullets hit his armored back and then the concussion wave from the explosion. His ears rang.
Behind him, the rest of the team moved to provide covering fire. Andy slid off his team leader and grabbed the man’s legs, flattening himself out behind him to maintain a low profile while he dragged.
“One down!” he shouted into the local communication net. “It’s Carser. Unconscious and breathing. Heavy bleeding. Possible femoral.”
“I’ve got you.” It was Arsel coming up behind him, lobbing fire into the corridor with her automatic grenade launcher.
“Are we clear?” another soldier asked.
“We’re clear,” Arsel said. She moved ahead of Andy in a crouch, kicking the remains of a drone. “Standard stuff. Looks like they were firing nine millimeters at us. That makes no sense.”
“Might as well be a home defense drone,” Brit said, walking up beside Arsel. Any remnants of their earlier teasing was gone.
Andy pulled off the cracked armor plate from Carser’s leg to see if he could get at the bullets. It must have been a lucky shot that hit the armor on a weak point as there was no way light weapons fire would have gotten through.
One bullet was lodged in the carbon-fiber under-layer, but the other had slipped through. Andy pulled a slap-pack out of his kit and put it on the wound. The small robotic system quickly extracted the bullet and placed a stint in the artery.
Carser came-to and raised his helmet slightly. “Don’t be messing with my junk, Sykes,” he said. “I’m sensitive.”
“You can save that for somebody else,” Andy said. “You’ll be up in a second. The bleeding’s stopped.”
“Damn it. I thought I might get an early nap.”
Andy slapped the side of his helmet and gave him a thumbs-up.
“Sykes,” Arsel called. “We need the rest of the fireteam up here. You clear?”
“I’m clear.” He gave Carser a final nod and raised his rifle, moving down the burned corridor after Arsel and Brit. They’d turned down the right-hand corridor at the intersection, apparently the direction the drones had been guarding. A doorway stood open about five meters down. Arsel stood in the opening with Brit nowhere to be seen. Arsel gave Andy a rapid wave, urging him closer.
Andy sprinted forward to the doorway. Without pausing, he turned to look into the room beyond, thinking they needed him to fall into a three-soldier battle drill to clear the room.
He stopped just inside the door. The room was an oversized square, probably thirty meters by thirty. The entire room was full of waist-high lounges with narrow consoles near the head of each bed. Unlike the other rooms, this one was full of children in white smocks, lying asleep on the beds.
Brit stood in the middle of the room, a dark-gray uniform surrounded by white. She had lifted her face shield to look around, her face a mask of terror.
Andy swallowed hard and called in the situation report, voice nearly cracking when he reported that it appeared to be a mass experiment on children.
Chapter Thirty-Two
STELLAR DATE: 08.27.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sunny Skies
REGION: Cruithne Station, Terran Hegemony
Cara hated the look on her dad’s face, a mix of deep worry and the robotic flatness he sometimes got when the world fell apart around him. All his usual humor went away and left a person she didn’t fully understand. At least, she had spent enough time with that version of Andy Sykes to know what to expect. It was best if she stayed out of his way.
She pressed the tiny speaker to her ear, listening in on the bypass channel she had used to tap into on Link conversations on the ship. The hack only worked on Sunny Skies, where the ancient computer system had several “switching” points for the Link. The voices came across warped and strange sometimes, especially when the speaker seemed to be projecting more emotion than words, but it worked well enough. If she could see their faces the entire conversation was easy enough to understand.
From the terminal in the family room, where they all watched vids together, she could only listen and try to guess at the communication taking place. Tim had followed her down the corridor when she’d left her room, stuffed dolphin under one arm and the poetry book under the other.
“Are you going to
listen?” he asked.
“No. Go back to your room.”
“You’re going to listen.”
Cara shook her head, choosing to ignore him rather than start a fight their dad might hear.
The strangest part of her eavesdropping system was that it picked up random thoughts flitting through her dad’s mind if they were singular enough. Words like No, Can’t do that, Kids, What? And, over and over again, her mother’s name: Brit. No, Brit. Why, Brit? How, Brit?
She wanted to cry at the low-level punishment he inflicted on himself almost continuously. Watching him, she would never have known the worries crossing his mind, strong enough to bleed through his Link.
Cara knew he and Fran had sneaked off to make love in the engine control room. Was it making love? ‘Having sex’ seemed like a better term. Before she’d understood what was going on, their smacks and slurps over the Link sounded more like people exercising themselves to death. She’d turned-off the channel as soon as Tim started asking, “What? What do you hear? Let me listen.”
“It’s nothing bad. We can’t listen right now,” she’d told him.
He’d gotten a sneaky grin and said, “They’re doing it, aren’t they?”
“It doesn’t matter what they’re doing.”
“Do you think Mom would care?”
Cara had given Tim a hard look, unsure how to answer. It didn’t matter what Mom would have thought. Mom wasn’t here. Besides, most of her memories of Mom and Dad together were of her father trying to give Mom a hug and her pushing him away, complaining, “Andy!”
She waited five minutes before checking back in on the channel. Still hearing them grunting like animals alongside flashes of emotion that made her woozy, she waited another five minutes. Finally, after fifteen minutes, the channel had gone quiet.
Cara pressed the speaker to her ear, trying to figure out if they were going back up to the command deck or not. She wanted to meet them in the corridor so she wouldn’t be stuck in her room again.
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