“How’re we doing there, lars?” He asked brusquely.
“I should be able to crack any security blocks by brute force with this core,” Lars muttered as he finished his setup and held a finger over an icon. “Ready, Inspector?”
Paul nodded and fell down the rabbit hole.
He could see millions of data nodes. His mind automatically directed the CPU to arrange it in physical format so he could understand it better.
“They’ve got more than eight hundred shipping destinations on this world alone,” Lars complained. “None of them are jumping out at me. Maybe if we search for large or over-sized goods…”
“Maybe we can link them up with cameras,” Paul suggested. He waved at the holo projection of data nodes, spread around a three-dimensional representation of Narsa.
He selected the camera layer and hid the rest. “Shoot me your shipment destinations, Lars.”
He ghosted any cameras that didn’t have a company shipment within a hundred-meter radius. It was still a couple hundred. “Let’s eliminate any cameras with no security on them.”
That took them down to twenty-three cameras. Paul added them to a new layer and reviewed each camera, adding nearby cameras to the layer.
They were looking at nearly ninety cameras, spread around the world in tight clusters. “We could automate the search if we had facial images showing some of our missing citizens,” Paul muttered. “Colonel Urbica, can you see if…”
Lars thrust a small polymer sheet into his hands.
Paul looked down at a young woman. The facial structure was very similar. “Your sister?” he asked the young trader.
A nod. “Bjorghildr. She’s only fifteen.” His voice trembled. “I signed up after she went missing a year and a half ago.”
Paul touched the points on the lower right hand side and uploaded three images of the young woman. His ICI recognition algorithm identified the key facial elements and he set it to search the incoming feeds.
Once he was ready, he directed his CPU to crack the security codes on every camera in the list. In a matter of seconds, the quantum core had run through every possible combination of glyphs and opened the feed from each unit.
“How long will it take?” Lars asked.
“Hard to say,” Paul told him. “We might get a hit right away or it might be days. I’m also searching for generic Human features but we still get false matches from a template, even with Grays. Frankly, I think it’ll happen quickly, if they have cameras on our people.”
“Are you just going to stand there till we find something?” Urbica asked him.
“No, I can carry on with this running in the background,” he replied. “I only use the CPU for police work. If you let yourself get dependent on it to do your thinking, you can end up a complete basket case.”
“Only police work, huh?” She looked mildly relieved. “I suppose…” She stopped in mid sentence, one hand reaching for her left ear.
“They’ve found her!” The sensor officer shouted. “They found the Xipe Totec!”
A cheer rang out on the bridge. People were smiling and slapping each other on the back. Urbica had to shout to be heard over the din. “Quiet!” She opened a channel, routing it through the Dauntless and her string of ASL’s.
A very hazy Tony Nathaniel shimmered into view. “Colonel, it’s sure nice to see you again,” he declared. “We were starting to think we’d have to assault Narsa the old-fashioned way.”
“And give the bastards a fair fight?” She shook her head. “You know the rule, Major.”
“Fair fights fill graveyards,” Tony replied with what looked like a grin. His image was growing stronger. “Have you picked up any leads while we were off touring?”
“We’re closing in on a location. We might be sending you in very soon.”
“I like the sound of that, ma’am. We should be back on station in twenty minutes.”
She closed the channel. “Lars, why don’t you drop down to engineering? See if Daffyd needs any…”
“Whoa!” Paul exclaimed suddenly. “Looks like somebody just turned a light on. Folks, I think we have a hit!”
He changed the display from a rotating image of Narsa to a large room filled with racks of pods, three high. “I’ve discarded more than three hundred false positives from surprisingly Human-looking Grays since we started, but I think this is the real deal.”
He moved toward the image, pointing at a pod. “Same pods we found here in the hangar bay, and those faces are really low resolution, but I think they’re Human.”
Lars moved forward on Paul’s right, pointing at one pod with a reticule around it. “What’s the target for?”
A deep breath. “The algorithm assesses a thirty-one percent chance of that being Bjorghildr.”
Lars stepped right up to the pod, but the three-dimensional projection was hazy. With the camera at the far end of the chamber, it lost too much resolution to be certain of the faces. He shook his head in frustration.
“The location is about to pass into night,” Paul advised. “By the time Major Nathaniel gets here with the 488, it will be a perfect time to hit them.”
Lars looked up at Paul, eyes wide with excitement. “That was her!” he declared excitedly. “It can’t just be a coincidence.”
“What can’t just be a coincidence, Lars?” Urbica asked him.
“My sister was named after an ancient goddess of the evening mist,” he explained. “The name comes from the words for ‘salvation’ and ‘battle’.” He held out his hands to the sides. “Look, I’ve never been a mystic or anything, but this is too much to be coincidence. It’s fate.”
Paul looked at Urbica. “We are about to hit them at dusk…”
“And we’re going to be bringing a hell of a lot of mist,” Urbica added. She shivered.
Narsa
N’mid exited the transit module and ascended to the pedway level. He was several grades too junior to rate a personal transport, even though his work may well restore the future of his race. His chin raised a fraction as he walked.
He knew he was vital to the program. His methodologies were far more robust than those of his superiors. The subjects rarely lasted more than a few hours, but he’d unlocked more data about telomere degeneration in the last two years than the rest of the team had in a full body-span.
One day, one of his superiors would make a grievous error and there would be advancement available. Getting ahead in the Genetics Corps took a careful blend of caution and daring.
N’mid possessed just such a blend. His chin raised another fraction, but then he stopped walking and brought his blatant swaggering under control. It wouldn’t do to walk into the institute like he owned the place.
Not for the next few centuries at least.
A shimmer in the night sky caught his attention and he looked up to find what looked like ripples in water. He blinked in fascination. The ripples hovered in the air, only a few cubits away. Even his weak arms could have thrown a small object with enough force to hit the anomaly.
As he watched, the center of the ripples was suddenly snatched away and a glimmering surface appeared in its place, growing to fit the outer edges.
His fascination suddenly turned to horror as an evil-smelling rush of gas came tumbling out of the hovering mirror, causing an intense, freezing pain on his skin. He tried to give voice to his fear but his vocal cords froze and shattered as the muscles of his neck flexed.
Before he could suffocate in the unbreathable gasses of Nilak, his body froze solid and he remained there, stuck to the pedway. His corpse bore witness to the arrival of the first heavy attack gunships of the Imperial Marines.
The second gunship swooped low to dodge an automated air defense beam and smashed his frozen remains to pieces. Its wingman took out the Gray weapon platform and they moved on.
“We’ve knocked out the air defense systems in our target sector,” Tony advised. “I’m taking the ground assault in now.”
“Good hunting, Major,” Urbica replied. “And come back in one piece.”
The Xipe Totec was sitting directly in front of the event horizon. Any ships being launched or recovered would be spared the vagaries of flying through a sixteen-hundred-kilometer-per-hour slipstream.
Tony gave the pilot a thump on the shoulder. “Get us on the ground, Harrison.” He headed back to lock in.
The heavily armored dropship lifted off the deck and moved forward. The rest of the transports would follow at regular intervals.
They hurtled out of the portal into a dark haze and Harrison pulled a hard turn to port, dropping between a row of buildings and accelerating to a terrifying speed. Tony had a great deal of respect for pilots like Harrison.
The fast assault pilots got most of the glory, but guys like Harrison often faced just as much danger but with less weapons and maneuverability. That was why he pushed his ship to the edge of its limits.
The red lighting in the troop compartment suddenly went to half illumination. Time for the equipment check. They all confirmed their ammunition load-outs and double-checked their data feeds.
The lighting dropped to one quarter illumination and they held their weapons to the sides, giving room for the ceiling-mounted restraints to retract on touchdown.
Tony felt the familiar old lurch in his gut as the transport reversed its forward thrust to begin the standard controlled crash of a combat landing. They seemed to drop like a rock and then slowed rapidly at the last second, rifle barrels hitting the deck all around him as the grav plating temporarily lost it’s fight against the small vessel’s deceleration profile.
The landing points made contact with a thump and the restraints retracted. Without a word, the two platoons of armored Marines trotted down the back ramp and set up an all-around defense as the armored craft lifted off to circle overhead. The dropships would remain on station, providing aerial surveillance and limited fire support from their conventional weapons.
And hopefully they would be picking up passengers.
More landers were hitting the street to his rear, and Tony was glad to see that the lieutenant commanding of the first platoon decided to lead his men toward the research facility. Tony almost always approved of decisions that kept up the momentum.
The hollow echo of small arms fire began to reach them from farther back and it appeared the fifth platoon was meeting light resistance. First platoon pushed on, reaching a loading door where they placed a set of charges and pulled back a few feet.
They were fighting in full armor and they were running fully closed up. The blast effect on them would be negligible.
The door blew into the loading bay and the Marines rushed the opening. Dull thuds indicated the second assault group was entering the facility from the other side.
A Gray rushed into the room to investigate the explosion and died in a hail of 5mm rounds. The lieutenant started moving across the bay but halted, bringing his weapon up to fire.
He lowered his assault rifle, holding up a hand to warn his platoon to hold fire as well. The shadow in the hallway door was far too tall to be a Gray. “Imperial Marines,” he shouted.
“What the hell is going on?” a Human shouted back. “Where are we?”
Tony grinned. The plan was working, and thank God; thirty-seven thousand stasis pods would have been a hell of a lot of lifting. They’d never pull this off if the prisoners were unable to walk on their own.
Paul had managed to hack the systems and get them moving in advance.
“This way,” Tony shouted back. “We’ll explain when we get you to safety.”
He ran back out into the street and waved down a lieutenant. “Jackson, we’ve got evacuees coming out. I need you and your platoon to marshal them. Get ‘em on the ships and keep ‘em moving. If you need more men, grab whoever you need.”
Jackson got his men to work, clearing debris and personnel from a stretch of the street. He soon had infrared beacons planted for five landing zones and his men were lining up the flow of escaped prisoners in groups of two hundred and forty.
Tony made a note about Jackson. The man had a good head for details. A dropship that could carry eighty armored Marines could, in a pinch, carry two hundred unarmored civilians with some mild discomfort.
In a combat evacuation, two hundred forty civvies per ship was much better. Even with that kind of crowding, they were looking at more than a hundred and forty flights to evacuate the Humans. He was glad the ASL’s were already loitering overhead.
A dropship hammered onto the carbon matrix of the street, the shock of the combat landing punching Tony in the gut. He knew he shouldn’t love his work so much, but it was thrilling to unleash so much raw power on his Emperor’s enemies.
A pair of ASL’s landed next to the dropship and Jackson was already ushering the first group forward while his men were pushing four groups, combining them into two bigger ones. The ASL’s should be able to take more than four and a half hundred each.
The dropship lifted off as another ASL and a dropship descended toward the last two beacons. Tony opened a channel. “Bridge, patch me through to the forward air controller.”
A new layer of noise hissed in his helmet. “Connors, this is Major Nathaniel; I need you to prioritize the ASL’s for evacuee pickup. I don’t want us hanging around here any longer than we have to.”
“Understood, sir.” Connors replied. “We’ve got three pick-up zones running and the ASL’s are at full utilization. We’re just using the dropships to fill the cracks in the hangar cycle.”
“Right,” Tony hoped the tone of contrition made it through the comms system, “Good man, what’s your time-line estimate?”
“Another forty minutes for the civvies,” he advised, “and twenty more to get our grunts out.”
Tony knew it would feel like an eternity but, in terms of planetary incursions, this was a lightning raid. If he didn’t end up executed for stealing an expeditionary force, this operation would end up being taught to cadets at the academy.
Using every ship in the hangar, they were bringing in five loads of civilians every three minutes. That worked out to six hundred evacuees per minute and they were doing it deep inside Gray territory.
He looked up at the sound of a Gray auto-cannon. One of the loitering ASL’s above them had taken a hail of rounds in its starboard flank and began to spiral down into the city. Marines holding the next intersection scrambled out of the way as the armored craft thundered into the carbon surface.
The Marines raced back in, climbing over the wreckage to search for survivors.
Tony bit back the urge to contact the FAC again. Connors would already be aware that a Gray Hichef had slipped past the cordon of Marine gunships.
A formation streaked overhead and he looked up to see the lightly armored fast-attack ships favored by Urbica’s dragoons. They’d managed to slip through the gap between the Xipe Totec and the wormhole, and now they were lining up on the offending Hichef.
The throaty buzz of their guns caused everyone to look up. The Hichef yawed off course and then its shields failed. The Gray craft disintegrated and tumbled into the side of a tall building, raining debris onto the street below.
Some of the more recently-abducted civilians had recognized the markings and word quickly spread that the 1st Gliesan Dragoons had come as part of the rescue. The evacuees were screaming and cheering as their own fighters streaked off to plug the hole in the defenses.
“Keep them moving,” Tony growled across the open channel. “They can celebrate once we’re out of here.”
The counter at the upper right side of his heads-up display showed the rapidly rising count of evacuees stepping out of rescue ships and into the scanning envelope of the Xipe Totec. It would be a lifetime before he could order the withdrawal.
A deep boom sounded from several hundred meters away, the force racing through the carbon roadway and rattling his bones before the secondary wave reached him through the air, causing his teeth t
o chatter.
Gray heavy tanks, firing enhanced conventional rounds. He’d come up against the export version of Gray armor at the Susa rebellion and his experienced mind was able to place the vehicles from the delay between the two shocks.
He looked to the corner where the ASL had gone down. A squad of Marines came pelting around the corner, just ahead of a hail of debris from the road. Shards of carbon flew past behind them, torn up by the anti-personnel guns of the enemy tanks.
The mind-numbing hum of the heavy vehicles’ suspensor fields grew louder as they approached. Tony looked back to see the civilians frozen in terror. Before he could say anything, Jackson grabbed an evacuee and shoved her toward a waiting dropship. “Keep them moving,” he snarled over the open net, not caring if he was stepping on the toes of other platoon commanders.
No knowing if it would last beyond his return to CentCom, Tony accessed the personnel system and awarded the man a brevet rank of captain. It might never be confirmed but it should at least let his good sense carry the day if a conflict with another platoon commander should arise.
The automated notification fell into the queue and a computer-generated voice advised all ground units of the change, timed with an update to the rank display on Jackson’s armor.
The hum from the tanks indicated they were close to the corner. They’d be in a position to fire on the landing zone in seconds.
A series of loud chirps heralded the ignition of the hydrogen-based propellant of several Ice-Picks. The Ice-Picks were a close-quarters anti-armor and bunker-buster weapon that used a thermodynamic precursor warhead to bring the temperature of the targeted area close to absolute zero.
The relatively small main warhead could then shatter the frozen armor and send a stream of explosive gasses inside. The weapons were small enough for the grenadier of each fire-team to launch from a tube beneath the barrel of his rifle.
The hum began to lose its volume. At least one tank had fallen silent and the chittering noise told Tony that another had taken damage. A second volley of chirps put an end to the noise altogether and the Marines who’d played decoy got up and ran back around the corner to link up with their hidden comrades.
Rebels and Patriots (Imperium Cicernus Book 3) Page 19
