by M. D. Cooper
Satisfied that no one was waiting for them, and that there were no active defense systems, he pushed the door open and began to walk slowly down the hall.
Despite Kal’s worry, nothing happened, and they reached the lift doors without incident.
Kal shrugged.
Barry gestured toward the door with the universal staircase sign above.
After giving Kal a curious look, Barry walked to the door and pushed it open only to jump back as a pile of rubble fell out.
Barry turned toward the lift.
The two men entered the lift, which held steady under their weight. Kal sent his drone through a crack around the roof access hatch and let out a long groan.
Kal shook his head.
The other man nodded, though he looked a few shades paler.
MEANWHILE, IN HEAVEN
STELLAR DATE: 10.02.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Finn’s Mod Shop, Heaven
REGION: Scattered Disk, Gedri System, Gedri Freedom Alliance
“Gert? You get that latest shipment tagged and put away?”
A sigh hissed out of Gert’s lips and she turned to give Finn a level stare. “You mean the potato chips?”
“Uh huh,” Finn said, not looking up from the spinal reinforcement mod he was working on. “I want to make sure that they’re all in the right order based on expiration date.”
“You know that I’m the most talented neural modder on Heaven, right?” Gert placed her hands on her hips, green slanted eyes narrowing as she regarded the shop owner. “I have more important things to do than sort your potato chips by expiration date.”
Finn didn’t look up from his work. “Then mod something to sort them for me, if you’re so smart.”
Gert’s eyes narrowed further. “Maybe I would, if my jerkwad boss didn’t give me all this busy work all the time.”
A snort burst from Finn. “Yeah, that guy’s such a dork.”
“That’s why I stole a bag of his chips.”
“You what?” Finn’s head shot up, eyes boring into hers. “Oh…you…ha ha. Very funny.”
Gert shook her head, tentacles dancing across her shoulders. “You know I don’t like potato chips.”
“And that’s how I know there’s something wrong with you,” he replied, turning back to his project.
“That’s how you know? Not the green skin, long limbs, or the tentacles on my head?”
Finn shrugged. “Nothing wrong with any of that. Sometimes I think about getting tentacles, too. Just a lot of work to get the brain to deal with that many digits.”
Gert laughed, dancing her tentacles around her head. “Yeah, that took some work. I don’t recommend doing open brain surgery on oneself.”
“Wouldn’t need to,” he replied. “I have you on staff.”
“Just remember that, next time you think it’s my job to sort your food.”
Finn started to reply, but then his brow furrowed. “Someone’s in the hall.”
“We’re not expecting anyone,” Gert said, glancing toward the inner door that led out to the shop. Beyond that was a solid door with a long hall on the other side. “How’d they get in there?”
“I don’t know.” Finn stood. “But it’s not a good sign, that’s for damn sure.”
Gert nodded and walked across the small lab that also functioned as the pair’s operating theatre, heading for the weapons locker. She pulled out a pulse rifle and tossed it to Finn, while her tentacles grabbed a pair of pulse pistols.
Normally, weapons were forbidden on Heaven. The station was supposed to be neutral ground for any faction.
In reality, greedy assholes were everywhere, and the pair always stood ready to defend themselves.
With the rifle in hand, Finn walked out into the shop’s main room and called out, “Who the hell are you, and what do you want?”
Gert tapped into the hall cameras and watched the man from several angles. There were a dozen systems she could activate to take him down before he even touched the door. The corridor was lined with turrets, electrical discharge rods, and hacked a-grav plates that would pull a person to the floor in seconds.
“I’m here on behalf of the president,” the man called out, looking up at the nearest camera. “I want to have a chat is all.”
Gert pursed her lips.
“We gave at the office!” Finn called back to the man. “Elect President Maverick. Booyah. Now go away.”
<’We gave at the office’?>
Gert snorted a laugh.
“What the hell does that mean?” the man called out. “We don’t have an office, and Maverick is already president.”
“Right!” Finn called back. “We won! Goooo us! Now bugger off.”
A motion sensor tripped at the shop’s rear entrance, and Gert pulled up the feeds, scanning the back hall. It was empty, and no IR or EM of any sort was registering. Still, it was an odd coincidence.
Before she could complete the message, the back door exploded inward, barely visible shapes darting through the smoke. One moved toward Gert, and she fired at it with both pulse pistols.
“Fuck!” a voice cried out, and she fired again and again.
The intruder’s stealth armor failed, and she saw a man lying on the ground, rocking back and forth, moaning softly.
She was about to disarm him when a sound came from the front room. Gert rushed through the doorway and saw Finn struggling with an invisible attacker, two of his arms flailing at his enemy while the others still held the pulse rifle.
She took a step into the room, ready to help, when a voice from behind her barked, “Freeze!”
Gert tapped into the feeds and saw four more intruders flooding into the lab, weapons all aimed at her back.
Finn stopped fighting and met her gaze. “Aww shit.”
THE SHADE
STELLAR DATE: 10.02.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Red Zone, City of Montral, Jericho
REGION: Gedri System, Silstrand Alliance
Barry had only hit the walls of the lift shaft twice during their ascent. Kal wasn’t exactly impressed; if they had to descend under fire, he was worried the man wouldn’t manage as well.
If we even use the tunnels as egress.
He didn’t like the idea of retreating to what would be an easily discernable exit point.
The doors at the top of the shaft had
proven harder to breach. They were connected to an active security system, and once through, the pair of men found themselves in a series of long-unused storage rooms.
Most were filled with equipment for the pumping station below, but some contained other detritus, the flotsam and jetsam that accumulated over centuries.
Like most of Montral, the ground under the Red Zone was a warren of tunnels that had seen a thousand uses over the years. The lift shaft had let them out only a hundred meters from The Shade’s tower, but still sixty meters below the surface.
He knew that even if Yaris was lax—which he wasn’t—there would be some patrols, and certainly a suite of automated defenses waiting for the unwary.
But Kal was not unwary.
Four separate microdrones now roved through the passages around the two men, alerting them to automated defenses and aberrant EM signatures that could indicate sensors or hidden weapons systems.
Despite the fact that they’d been traveling for over half a day, Kal was starting to feel a modicum of optimism. He’d always assumed that Maverick’s defenses would be impenetrable and that no one could sneak into the Red Zone unnoticed. Thus far, that belief seemed to be unfounded.
Everyone just must assume that Maverick would have these tunnels filled with defenses…I guess rumor and fear are cheaper than actual security.
It took twenty minutes to reach the lower levels of The Shade tower, and in that time, they only encountered one patrol and one pair of engineers, both of which they avoided by taking side passages.
The other man nodded.
Kal wasn’t sure what Barry could do if they weren’t able to get the collar off. Probably stay with his sister and die horribly.
Stars…so many ways this can go wrong. Why am I doing this again? Oh yeah, because I hate Maverick.
He pushed that simmering rage back down to where it wouldn’t get in the way, and pointed out the two entrances to the area where the slaves were held.
Kal twisted his lips, shaking his head.
The two men worked their way through the corridors, Kal’s drones now working to actively hide the pair by throwing up EM shields to confuse sensors, and disabling optics. There weren’t a lot of automated systems, but Kal began to worry that a savvy monitoring NSAI would spot a pattern of disturbances.
Even so, they managed to reach the corridor that ran along the slave area’s rear entrance without raising any alarms. A pair of guards patrolled the hall, casually chatting as they walked toward the intersection where Kal and Barry waited around the corner.
Kal took several calming breaths, readying himself for everything to go horribly wrong. Then, timing it for when the guards were only a meter from the intersection, he stepped out and fired his pulse rifle, a wide spread of concussive waves knocking back both guards.
Shit, armor’s better than I thought.
He switched to a focused burst and fired a shot at the closest guard’s head, then turned to the other. The woman had managed to unsling her own rifle, and fired a pulse blast that caught Kal in the left shoulder.
“Fucker,” he muttered and shot her in the face.
The pulse smashed her nose, and the woman fell like a rock.
“Smooth,” Barry said in a tone that was hard to parse.
Kal only nodded and grabbed the woman’s arm, dragging her to the storage room, while Barry pulled the first guard after.
As he spoke, Kal unfolded two faraday blankets and wrapped them around the guards.
Kal shot Barry a dark look.
Barry rose and strode toward the door, and Kal leapt up and clamped a hand on the other man’s shoulder, spinning him around to stare into Barry’s eyes.
For a moment, it looked like the man was preparing a retort, but then a modicum of tension flowed out of his shoulders.
After checking that the coast was still clear, Kal eased open the door, and the two men walked down to the slave area’s doors.
“You ready?” Kal asked aloud.
“Yeah.”
He pushed the door open to reveal a long hall with open doorways leading off along both sides. From the plans Barry had gotten his hands on, each one led to a long room filled with bunk-style beds—something he confirmed as they reached the first door.
“They look asleep,” he said quietly. “You take the one on the left, I’ll take the one on the right, if we find your sister, don’t wake her, just get the ID off her collar. We’ll need that to unlock it at the guard terminal.”
Barry nodded, and the two men split up. Kal kept a visual of what the man’s sister looked like up on his HUD, skipping over the men—of which there were few—and examining each woman’s face. There were twenty bunks in each room and ten rooms on either side. If they were all occupied, that meant Maverick had nearly a thousand slaves below The Shade—and those were just the members of the lower caste. From what he’d heard, many more resided above.
The first room was a bust, and he moved on to the second, keeping an eye on the feeds from his microdrones, which were now at the doors on either end of the main hall. He knew it would only be a matter of time before someone demanded a check-in from the two guards. Once that happened, people were going to start paying a lot more attention to what was going on in the slave dormitories.
He and Barry moved quickly through the rooms, not finding any sign of Barry’s sister. Kal was a room behind Barry—who was on the last one on his side, when the doors on the near-end of the hall burst open, light flooding into the dim passage.
“Freeze!” a voice commanded, and Kal let out a long groan, knowing that he wouldn’t have time to reach cover before the armored figure in the doorway took him down.
“OK!” he called out, raising his hands. “Frozen here.”
No sound came from the dormitory Barry had entered moments earlier, and Kal hoped the man wouldn’t do anything stupid.
He’d expected a confrontation at some point, and so long as Barry stuck to the plan, they’d get through it alive.
“Took you long enough to get here,” a voice said from behind the bulky figure.
Kal pursed his lips, holding back a curse as Yaris stepped around. The man wore a smug grin as he stayed close to the wall, out of the armored guard’s line of fire.
“Just happened to be down here making the rounds?” Kal asked. “Or were you coming to take a sample?”
Yaris laughed and shook his head. “No, I don’t need to stoop to collared women to get my rocks off. I’ve actually been waiting for you. Took you longer than I expected, I was starting to wonder if you turned back.”
“How long?”
“The staircase you took in the Atmo Tower. Thing’s loaded with passive sensors. Been watching your progress all night.”
Kal frowned. “Why’d you let us get in?”
“Figured it would be a good security test. I didn’t alert any patrols, so the asshats that missed you moving through the tunnels are going to have a bad day today…and tomorrow. Honestly, though, I’m disappointed.”
“Oh?” Kal cocked an eyebrow. “Why’s that?”
“Well, just that you’d risk your life for some collared slave. Would you like to sift through our trash bins as well? I bet we’ve thrown out other scraps you might be interested in.”
“You’re a real comedian, Yaris.”
The man’s jovial expression vanished in an instant. “And you’re a royal pain in the ass, Kal. You should have stayed away. Getting back on Maverick’s radar was a bad idea.”
Kal let a smile tug at the corners of his mouth. “Well, you’ve only got that partially right.”
“Oh?”
“I’m not on Maverick’s radar…yet.”
The moment the last word left his lips, the wall next to the guard exploded, flinging the armored soldier into Yaris, knocking both to the ground.
Kal didn’t waste the opportunity. Rifle in his hands, he toggled the weapon to fire large caliber slugs, and fired a trio at a crack in the guard’s armor where the breastplate met the pauldron.
The second round knocked the shoulder guard off, and the third took the man’s arm. Kal stepped forward and fired another two slugs into the wound, turning the man’s insides into pudding.
