Siege Protocol: The Separatist Wars: Book 3

by Thomas Webb

  Almost.

  The second wave of fighters strafed the remaining mechs with cannon fire as the attack birds flew in fast and low.

  “Outstanding work, Flight Leader,” Hale communicated. “As always, you were right on schedule.”

  “Anytime, Alpha One. We’re bingo fuel again so we gotta RTB. But we’ll be back on-station ASAP.”

  “Thanks, Valkyrie.” Hale suddenly remembered that all the explosives they’d wanted to use for the breach were spent earlier on a single mech. He was glad he hid.

  “Alpha One to Flight Leader,” he said. “Before you go, if we paint a target for you can you lock on it?”

  “can we lock on a target for you?” Shane asked. “Does a Salusian bear shit in the pink woods?”

  He swore he could hear her smiling over the comms.

  -25-

  Hale stepped over what was left of an armored mercenary. A portion of the blood red ULS logo still shone prominently on the Andarian’s shattered chest cavity. The front lobby, and indeed the entire front section of the ULS building, lay in ruins. The front of the building was now a gaping maw, broken plexglass and chunks of duracrete like jagged shards of broken teeth.

  A series of two-hundred twenty-seven-kilogram bombs tended to do that when they impacted.

  “All teams—spread out,” Hale said. “My team will take the central corridor.”

  Hale had surveyed the facility layout. There were four areas, including three corridors. One assignment for each element of his ground force.

  “Roger that, Alpha One. Bravo has the left side corridor.”

  “Charlie team copies. We’ll hold the perimeter.”

  “Good copy for Delta. We’ll take the right wing.”

  “Copy all,” Hale said. “Watch your asses, people. Stay frosty.”

  The ground forces split. Hale took his section, including Johnny Chin, Cutter, and Kris, along the central corridor. They moved through the structure until they reached a fork, where the central hall broke off in two directions.

  “We have to split here,” Hale said. “Johnny Chin—take half the team down the port side passageway. Me and the rest of the team will take starboard.”

  “Copy that,” Chin said.

  Hale signaled and they divided into two groups. Hale stalked ahead of his group, walking point and careful to keep his spacing even. Suddenly his senses buzzed. Hale whipped up a fist and froze. He couldn’t place it, but something felt off.

  “Hold,” he whispered.

  Too late.

  The cable shot out of nowhere, the three peristeel prongs embedding themselves deep into his chest plate.

  “Uggh!” Hale grunted, as much from the surprise as the impact. The cable tightened and yanked.

  “Hale!” Kris shouted.

  Hale felt himself snatched forward. He vaguely registered the blast wall drop behind him as he hurtled passed it, cutting him off from his team and any hope of support.

  Hale smacked into the floor. His armor’s operating system went nuts, the HUD jerking and freezing mid-view. He tried to move, but the servos were nonresponsive. Before he realized what was happening, someone had snatched his mag-locked weapons—both his rifle and his sidearm—from his grasp. A second later his armor reinitialized, reluctantly stirring to life like the awakening of a slumbering leviathan. Hale stood on shaky powered legs, getting his first good look at his new adversary.

  She’d retreated to the far end of the room. The shape of the armor told Hale she was female. The armor itself told him his new enemy was a Yurnai. Cybernetic humanoids, with the ability to affect anything electronic around them.

  Technomancers.

  Now it all makes sense, he thought.

  Hale steadied himself and dusted off his armor. He eyed her from across the enclosed corridor. “So you must be her?”

  “Her?” the Yurnai asked, her voice modulated through her helmet’s amplification system.

  “The assassin,” Hale said. “The one hired to take us out.”

  She held up her hands in mock surrender. “I am, like the people of Earth say, guilty as charged.” She bowed formally. “In case you were wondering, you may call me Kaizen.”

  “As a matter of fact, I was wondering.” Hale studied the powered cable that had snatched him so easily into this trap, and at the sealed blast doors. “You went to a hell of a lot of trouble to get me here, Kaizen.”

  “You would be hard-pressed to believe the extent,” she replied. “The grappling hook alone required more resources than I would have thought necessary. Even then, there was a chance that you would have selected one of the other corridors to investigate. But no matter. . . I am glad you managed to make it this far. That was a nice tactic with the mech, by the way. Until your air support arrived, I did not think I would be able to collect on my bounty.”

  Hale remained still. He took the opportunity to study her. What would her next move be?

  “I am glad you did not die on the battlefield today,” she said. “It would have marred a perfect record. You see, I have never failed to complete a contract.”

  “I’ve heard your people are very good at what they do,” Hale said. “I’m glad I could help you maintain your perfect winning season.” He suddenly had a vision of the 1972 Miami Dolphins of Miami, Florida—the only undefeated North American football team in human history—and almost laughed.

  Kaizen drew a blade from her back-some sort of dull green metal surrounded by a strange energy of the same color—and drove it into the floor. The ease with which it penetrated the layers of duracrete wasn’t lost on Hale. A blade like that would cut through his armor like warm butter.

  “You plan on using that thing?” he asked her.

  “At first?” Kaizen replied. She shook her head. “No. The ceremonial blade will only be used to finish you.” She stood motionless across the room from him, a ball of kinetic energy ready to explode. “I have studied you, Trace Hale. You are a warrior. A worthy adversary for me.” She nodded to herself. “We will fight. But we will do it according to the old ways . . . according to Yurnai tradition. And when our combat is complete? I will hand you the warrior’s death you deserve. Then I will collect my fee.”

  “So I guess that’s settled,” Hale said. “One last question before we get started?”

  “I will allow this question,” Kaizen said. She held up a single finger. “But only one.”

  Hale bent his knees, clenched his armored fists, and grit his teeth. “Are all your people so damned talkative?” he spat.

  “Not all of us,” she replied. She took up a fighting stance. “Shall we begin?”

  -26-

  As Kaizen hurtled toward him, Hale thought about how nice it would have been to have just been able to shoot her.

  “Hai!” she shouted, her deceptively small fist striking his helmet.

  The blow turned his head, even through the helmet’s thick peristeel plating. Hale dropped to his knees, dazed despite the protection of FAST armor rated to withstand planetary atmospheric entry.

  He shook his head to clear it. “Ok,” he said, staggering to his feet. Hale rolled his shoulders to loosen them up. “If that’s how you want to play it.”

  With his bell already rung once, Hale went on the offensive. He shifted his feet to a fighting stance, pushing forward with a series of quick punch combinations. Kaizen blocked all of them, as if they were in a sparring session and she was just warming up. What she didn’t block was the fake backfist to spinning side kick Hale threw.

  Hale felt the satisfying smack as the heel of his boot connected, sending the Yurnai assassin spiraling into the far wall. She impacted hard, but to her credit sprung back to her feet in a nanosecond.

  Kaizen actually laughed.

  “Impressive,” she said.

  Hale frowned. He wasn’t sure how to feel about that laughter. Before he could make up his mind, she was on him again.

  Kaizen led with a flurry of blurred punches and kicks, each one seemingly faste
r than the last. She followed with a series of leaps and spin-kicks, intensified by speed so astounding he could barely duck and dodge. She ended her assault with a palm-heel strike to the solar plexus of his armor. Hale found himself removed from his feet, hurtling across the room.

  Gravity reintroduced itself when he cracked into the peristeel blast door. His FAST armor seemed inconsequential as the impact snatched his breath away.

  Hale slid down the door. He sat there on his ass, dazed for the second time this fight, struggling for breath. He went to stand and winced, ending up right back on the floor where he’d started. She might have cracked a rib with that last blow. How the hell was that even possible all the way through his armor? Speaking of, his HUD began to flash red.

  “Warning,” the suit chided him. “Damage to internal systems imminent.”

  Yeah, Hale thought. No shit.

  Kaizen said nothing. Instead she simply paced back and forth with a casual swagger, as if she were on an evening stroll.

  “Okay,” Hale grunted. He pushed himself back to his feet, grinding his teeth against the pain. Even breathing hurt. “Ready to finish this thing?” he asked her.

  Kaizen laughed. “Are you?”

  Hale chuckled, pushing the pain down to a deep, dark place. He juiced the armor with all it had, sending every last bit of energy he could muster into one last, desperate gambit. With the power meter pegged, he rushed her.

  Hale leaped, his left knee raised and forward, his right fist drawn back. Just as he’d hoped, the aggression of his charge seemed to catch her off guard.

  Hale landed a solid ‘superman’ punch to her helmet, connecting with a resounding crack. Kaizen staggered. Hale wasted no time in following up, his armored fists churning like pistons. Two to the body. One to the head. A nice spinning back fist followed, missing by nanometers as Kaizen bent backwards to avoid it. Hale lunged, measuring his window of opportunity to strike in seconds. Kaizen whipped around, ran up the wall and leapt against it, executing a backflip.

  Time seemed to slow as Hale swung, missed, and watched her somersault above his head. She landed behind him with the grace of an Andarian cat. Before he could turn to face her, a jump-spin kick smacked into his helmet, whipping his neck around with a crunch.

  Things got a little fuzzy after that and his world tilted sideways. The next thing he heard was the crash as he impacted duracrete wall.

  “You. . . are a warrior,” she panted, standing above him. He guessed that was supposed to be a compliment. “You have been. . . much more than I expected.”

  Hale, now flat on his face, tried to perform a pushup. He failed, then tried again. This time he made it to his knees. Meanwhile his HUD was going apeshit. In fifteen years of active duty and a couple more as a PMC, there were warnings on that HUD he was pretty sure he’d never seen before. Judging from the pain in his side and the wave of nausea that swept over him, his actual body wasn’t doing too hot, either.

  He turned to look up at her. The chest plate of her armor heaved with her breathing. At least he’d winded her. He laughed at that, the laugh turning into a cough.

  “Got you. . . just . . . where I want you,” he said.

  She nodded to herself. “I expected nothing less.” She dropped to a knee and punched him again, sending him back flat to the deck.

  Hale took stock of himself. He had, at best, one good shot left in him. Kaizen leaned down toward him. Hale waited for her to get close enough.

  Come on, he thought. Just a little closer . . . a little closer.

  Hale exploded upward, grabbing Kaizen in a double-leg tackle. With a roar he leaped as high as his armor would allow, ignoring the blaring warning signal in his ears. Together the two of them came down, crashing into solid duracrete with Kaizen’s body leading the way.

  His rage burned red-hot as she recovered enough to wrap her legs around his waist in a classic jiu-jitsu defensive posture. He rained down armored fists, delivering what they called in the Corps ‘a vicious ground and pound’ attack. For every blow that he landed she dodged two, his fists missing her and cracking duracrete.

  “Enough of this!” she snarled.

  Kaizen grabbed his wrist and underhooked his opposite arm. She completed the move by placing her shin across his waist and sweeping him onto his back. Faster than he could follow she’d whipped around his head, had his chest clenched between her knees, and his forearm gripped in a serious joint lock. She could snap it easily, he knew, his beyond-smashed armor be damned. As she sat mounted on his ribcage with his arm securely in her grasp, the Yurnai assassin delivered an open hand smack to the housing of his armor’s power conduit, issuing a shut down command to the suit’s systems .

  The blaring in his FAST suit ceased. A warning signal flashed twice, then everything stopped. The armor powered down, dead.

  Kaizen rolled off him, coming unsteadily to her feet. “You have truly been . . . a worthy opponent,” she said.

  He could do nothing but watch, helpless, as she staggered across the room and gripped her blade. The sword flared to life at her touch, the metal emitting a dull green iridescent glow. She drew it from the duracrete and, clutching her shoulder, limped back toward him.

  “Using my abilities to disable your armor was not how I would have preferred to end this.” She shrugged. “I must confess, Hale. I am sorry to see you go.”

  With what must have been the last strength she could muster, she raised the blade high above his head.

  Hale breathed in deep, coughing.

  So this is it, he thought.

  It was now or never.

  Hale fired his armor’s servos. His HUD sparked to life. The flashing warning returned. He spun to his back, putting everything he had into a vicious leg sweep. The wounded and exhausted Kaizen took the brunt of it, the cybernetic leg snapping with the force of the blow. The assassin went flying, landing on her back. Hale sprung to his feet, the hot flash of pain from his broken rib promising him he would pay dearly for the move later. With Kaizen distracted by the sudden turn of events, Hale snatched the assassin’s sword from her hands.

  “My blade!” she roared.

  With all the strength he could muster, Hale drove the thing into her shoulder, pinning her to the duracrete floor.

  “Aaaaragh!” she roared.

  He guessed that shoulder must have been more flesh than cybernetic.

  Hale leaned on the hilt of the blade, needing the support. “Yeah,” he panted. “Sorry about that. Must have been a . . . nasty surprise for you when my armor came back online.”

  He managed to stagger away, clutching his side. He turned and collapsed, his back against the wall. This seemed like as good a time as any to catch his breath.

  Hale unlocked his helmet and pulled it off, dropping it from limp fingers to land with a thud on the floor. Kaizen, pinned to the floor like an insect in a display case, clawed at her shoulder, groaning and screaming her rage. Her cybernetic leg lay in pieces next to her, shattered just below the knee.

  “Not sure if you knew,” Hale said, gasping at the pain in his side. “But we’re pretty close with our AI. She’s got this really specific glitch, see. Always calls us by our military ranks. So when X37 called Shane—you know who Shane is, right? —when X37 called Shane by her first name, we ran a deep-dive diagnostic. Any idea what we found?”

  Kaizen snarled at him, clawing now not at her shoulder but at Hale.

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ll tell you. We didn’t find anything. Nothing at all. But what we did find was some missing time in her databanks. We cross referenced the timestamp of the gap in X37’s memory with the hangar’s holo monitors. Wanna guess what we found then?”

  More snarling.

  “I see you’re impatient. I’ll spare you the gory details.” Hale patted his armor and continued. “Armor’s got a cybernetic blocker in place. Everyone on this mission is equipped with one. You beat me and my armor to shit, for sure. But the one thing this armor won’t do? Is let a technomancer like you h
ack it.”

  Kaizen stopped moving. Hale grimaced as he pulled himself to his feet. He limped to her side. As he grasped the hilt of her blade, she gasped.

  “No,” she said, reaching her hand out, as if she could stop him. “It is forbidden!”

  “I think we’re way past that now,” Hale said.

  He pulled the sword from the floor and studied it. The metal glowed with a strange, green inner light. Etched into the blade were some sort of markings. The weight, heft, and balance were near perfect. It was a magnificent weapon.

  Hale looked at her, defeated and severely injured, her armor sparking in places. He reached down and released the seals on her mask. He pulled it off.

  She was beautiful. Her eyes were pure black and without pupils. Her skin was the same dull green color as the metal of the blade.

  “You’re an incredible warrior,” he said. “With your talents, someone like you could have done so much good.” He looked into the twin black pools of her eyes. “Why did you choose this?”

  She glared up at him and coughed. Flecks of dark blue fluid spattered her mouth and jaw. From somewhere on her body came the sounds of circuity popping and frying.

  She smiled. “It’s the credits, Hale. It always comes down to the credits. A great deal of them, in this case.”

  “What about honor?” he asked. “Don’t your people believe in that?”

  “The truest honor is in completing the contract.”

  “Funny,” Hale said. “I’d have thought you couldn’t put a price on honor.”

  “Honor can be well paid.” Kaizen coughed again. She pointed to the sword in his hand. “You have placed hands on my weapon. The blade is now defiled. And as you have prevented me from fulfilling my contract. . .” She offered her neck. “I ask that you end it now. It is my final wish.”

  Behind them, Hale heard a plasma torch firing up. He looked at the door, already turning red from the heat. His people would be inside soon enough. Hale looked down at his defeated opponent. He placed the spine of the blade on his forearm and knelt there, poised as if to strike. “I have no problem ending those who deserve it,” he said. He pointed the tip of the blade at her throat.