by TR Cameron
He nodded. “Sounds fair.” The band slipped into a slower tempo number, and he pulled her closer. Ethan Kimmel and Cia did the same, three couples over in the direction of the main entrance to the ballroom. They had both come up with formal wear, either because the Academy had packed it or because they’d improvised. They each made brief eye contact, slid their gaze to his dance partner, and then continued with their pretend romance. Maybe pretend. They had all day, after all, without a chaperone. He whispered in her ear, “All I know is that I’m supposed to meet you and take you away from all this.”
She shook her head. “There’s been a change of plan. Tell you in a bit.” They danced in silence until the number ended, and she said, “I’m getting a bit woozy in here. Feel like stepping into the lobby for a minute?” He obliged, of course, and they walked slowly toward the door. Once they exited, she drew him to the side, and they looked down over the lobby. Sirenno had changed positions and was now seated at one of the inside bars, but he still had a clear view of the staircase. Jax leaned over to put Veronica at the right angle to whisper in his ear and activated the white noise function on his wristcomm to hopefully defeat any listening devices that might be pointed at them. “I was supposed to bring something with me, but unfortunately, I couldn’t get it out. We’re a package deal.”
He sighed. That explains the training and the gear. Anika and the professor must have seen this as a possibility from the start. “Okay. What, where, and when?”
“It’s being held at the secure facility where we’ve been meeting. It’s a headquarters for the Confederacy’s leading company in artificial intelligence, but I think they’re doing illegal things there. And they’re using my research to do it.”
“You don’t work for a company, do you?”
She lowered her eyes. “No. I work for the Confederacy government.”
“That means we can’t meet again since they’ve probably got eyes on you. And doubtless, it would be out of character for you to go up to my room with me.”
Veronica chuckled. “Very true.”
“Okay.” He thought about it for a minute, then grabbed her hand, led her back to the dance floor, and whispered into her ear again. “We need to make our way over to that couple,” he nodded at Cia, “and exchange a few words. Then, you’re going to go to your room and stay there until the woman comes to get you. You’ll go straight from the resort to our ship.” She made a noise of protest, and he shook his head. “Too dangerous for you to stay, too dangerous for you to come with us. So, the ship. Don’t worry, you’ll be able to monitor us, and at need, talk to us. Now, follow my lead.”
Hopefully my lead won’t get us all killed tonight.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Jax returned to his room and triggered their rally plan. The first step was an encrypted transmission to the Grace, which would read as being powered down to anyone who examined her but actually had several systems operating on battery power. Then, over the course of a half-hour and at random intervals, the ship placed innocuous connections to his team’s wristcomms. The information didn’t matter; the mode of contact was the message. If it was a bug-out call, he would have made it directly.
He sauntered to the extra room that had been booked for their stay. A pair of married Academy folks had checked in separately the day before his team arrived, then publicly become a couple. Now the husband stayed in the wife’s suite, leaving his available for their use. When he opened the door, which had been hacked to accept the biometrics of all the team members, he found Cia already inside. She grinned up at him from where she lay on the bed. “Sorry to see you’re solo. I thought that chick might have a thing for you.”
He shook his head. “She’s a major scientist, not a ‘chick.’”
“So, what you’re saying is that she’s too smart for you. Honestly, I could see that on the dance floor. Pretty sure I saw you counting out loud to keep time.”
Verrand arrived while he was still laughing, and Kimmel and Sirenno shortly after. He tapped his wristcomm against each of theirs to ensure no signal loss as the devices downloaded the information he’d prepared. Probably unnecessary, but no point having the technology handy if you’re not going to use it. He leaned against the wall near the window and started the briefing. “Our single target has become two. She was supposed to have the data with her, but for whatever reason she doesn’t, so we have to go and get it. Well, most of us do.” He shifted slightly to face their pilot. “Cia, you need to collect her and take her to the Grace. If the op goes bad, at least you can get her away, and maybe she can recreate the data.”
He’d expected her to have something to say about being removed from the assault, but she only offered a thin smile and a nod. Alicia Rearden had turned out to be as impressive as Maarsen had said, and then some. “The rest of us are going to invade a business headquarters, or at least that’s what Veronica says it is.” The other three nodded. “We’ll maintain radio silence between the Grace and the assault team, except in the usual emergencies.”
Cia quipped, “Like, if I’m hungry and want you to bring something back for me? Or if Veronica misses you?” She said the woman’s name in a very childish, lovey-dovey way, and the entire group broke into laughter.
He scowled, “No. Well, maybe if she misses me, that would be okay.” He managed a thin smile, but his mind was on the challenges ahead. “All right. You all have the gathering location in your comms. Over the next hour, get your essentials packed and make your way to the site.” He considered the action to come, and made a decision he wasn’t comfortable with from a secrecy standpoint, but that he felt would tilt the odds in their favor. As long as they can do it in secret. “Cia, I’m going to ask you to do one other thing. Contact the pair that came in ahead of us. I need one of them to play courier.”
He’d packed his suitcase and rolled it through the lobby, explaining to the staff person who raced up to him in concern that he simply had to head back to the ship for a change of wardrobe. That seemed to mollify the young woman, who had apparently noticed him, accessed his records, and spotted an irregularity in seconds after seeing him with a bag. Impressive. A recon visit to the resort by yet another Academy person had prepared them to expect that kind of attention to detail, so each of them possessed a valid, or at least valid enough to get by, explanation for a late-night sojourn.
Three rally points had been set, each in a different direction and about a mile from the resort’s boundary. He’d selected the one closest to their destination, which fortunately was only an additional half-mile away. I wonder if the business settled by the resort or vice versa? It turned out to be a clearing where during the day, equipment for hiking around the local territory could be rented. At this hour, it was closed. He activated a piece of software the Professor had provided before his first trip with Cia, and it broadcast a signal to the surveillance cameras mounted above, instructing them to freeze an image until he sent the command to stop. Useful trick. Academy’s got some hot coders.
The courier arrived shortly after, on a rental all-terrain vehicle with huge wheels that would permit it to transit the sand as easily as if it were a paved road. Jax helped him unload the crates, then took the key from him. The original after-action plan had been to blend right back into the resort and leave the following day, but at need, some or all of them could use the ATV to go directly to the Grace. He’d trusted Cia to figure out how to get the supplies to the courier and the courier to them, and once again, she’d gotten the job done. Over the next half hour, the rest of his team arrived. When they were all assembled, he opened the boxes to reveal heavy combat armor. “I know you haven’t trained in this, but you’re all fit, and we won’t be wearing it overly long. There are more unknowns with this operation than I’m comfortable with, so we’re going to play it conservative.”
The others nodded. While they didn’t look pleased, which was likely the fear of what was to come at work on them, they did offer appreciative expressions. At times like this, t
he greatest enemy could be your own brain, spinning tales that got more alarming with each passing second. Fortunately, he’d been taught how to deal with it. “We’ll pair up. Buddy system all the way. Kimmel, you’re with me.” He would have selected Verrand if only two of them were going in. Since it was all four, he wanted to keep a personal eye on the occasionally overconfident video game expert.
He ordered everyone to put on their base gear, then used Kimmel as a model to demonstrate how to attach the reinforced plates. Two went on each leg, two on each arm, and one protected the chest and back. The real prize, though, was the full combat helmet, which he told them to hold for the moment. He opened the last crate and distributed web and flash-bang grenades to each team member, and he added a pair of knockout grenades to his belt, not trusting the others with them. An improperly seated helmet plus one of these can ruin your whole day. And your whole team’s. They were insurance, nothing more.
Finally, he checked each of them to make sure their rifles were properly strapped on, extra magazines slotted where they belonged, and grenades secured. “All right, put your tops on.” They verified one another’s seals and the command-and-control system that his equipment included confirmed the connection between helmet and suit was locked for all of them. Their line-of-sight communications were secure, so he had the luxury of being able to speak in the clear. “We’ll jog to the site, then take ten to recover and look it over. While we’re moving, run the combat tutorial through your helmet. It will tell you what the system can and can’t do.” He would be doing the same in case it had different features than he was used to. “I’m point, then Kimmel, then Sirenno. Verrand, you’re rear guard. Keep your hands clear of your weapons.” Disregarding his own advice, he unlimbered his rifle, made sure the barrel pointed down and to the side, and started to jog.
The trip took less than half an hour, and only that long because the footing was uncertain in places as they ran through the trees, so they’d had to slow. Their route paralleled a more well-traveled footpath that connected the two sites, but that obviously wasn’t a viable route. He called them to a halt a dozen feet from the tree line. “Break time.” He activated a countdown at eleven minutes in their displays. “Drink some electrolytes and rest. When the timer hits one minute, we’ll gear up and go on zero unless we see something that contradicts that approach.”
He found a trunk to put his back against that afforded him a view of the facility. If this was an SF op there would be satellite or drone imaging, including every kind of scan known to humanity. Under these circumstances, he was forced to make do with the magnified night vision in his helmet display. It showed a three-story building about as wide as it was high. The metal walls were primarily blue with black and white accents here and there. No windows or accesses other than the front double doors presented themselves. Veronica had only been able to tell them about the ground floor, which was made up of an entrance lobby, a theatre setup that they were using for their conference presentation, and a small coffee stand on wheels. She’d seen no stairwells and thought the only access to the higher levels was by elevator.
Which makes sense, security-wise. Jax was sure there would be some sort of emergency exit, but that didn’t always take the form of internal stairs. He’d seen one building design that included slides that deployed from each level like the ones on airplanes in really old movies. He and his team had laughed at the idea of using them as an ingress point, but they’d all agreed that there would be much more falling than invading with that approach.
He said, “The single vulnerability appears to be the doors, as we expected. They’ll have security monitoring. Kimmel, do your best to take it down but don’t sweat it if you aren’t able to. Their response can’t be that fast out here, and our goal is to be in, out, and gone before support has time to show up. Sirenno and I will handle blowing the doors. Once they’re open, we clear the bottom floor, then go up to three and work our way down. Veronica gave us a data signature to scan for that’s linked into all of our helmets, so once we get within twenty feet of the thing, we should be able to see where it is. If we get lucky and the levels aren’t separately shielded, we might manage to spot it as soon as we go in.” He was positive they wouldn’t get that lucky. No place with even a moderate level of security would fail to have separate sensor blocks in at least every ceiling. The really paranoid ones built cables into all the walls as well. Veronica hadn’t thought they’d be that locked down, but he was prepared for it if it happened.
“Any questions?” None were asked, and they discussed the specific details of their approach in the remaining time, including assigning Verrand to ensure that Kimmel didn’t go awry while he was simultaneously running and computing.
At one minute, the team took their rifles in hand. He looked them over and nodded. “You’ll do. Remember, keep your weapons set on stun unless you feel your life is at risk. I’m guessing we’ll face a half-dozen security personnel at the most, and their gear won’t be as good as ours.” He would never say out loud that a job was going to be easy because doing so would be tempting fate.
Still, this one seems easier than many, he thought, and then the timer hit zero.
The moment for action had arrived.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The fact that he’d jinxed them with his thought was obvious in the seconds after the small shaped charges set around the perimeter of the double doors detonated and dropped the metal slabs into the building. First, they were unexpectedly large, which indicated the walls were double-thick at least. Which probably means they’re shielded, too. Second, he’d expected only two guards in the lobby, figuring there would be six spread evenly across the levels. It held twice that, and he adjusted his anticipated count accordingly. They’d agreed that he would take the leftmost in any encounter, and the others would go to the right based on their position in line behind him.
His target went down before anyone else in the room reacted, but the remaining trio was quick to draw their pistols and fire, the loud snaps of projectile weapons firing muted automatically by his helmet. He was struck in the chest twice, and the third round missed as he carried his momentum into a baseball slide. Kimmel shouted something Jax didn’t take in, then the other three combatants changed from red to white outlines on his display, signaling that his team had stunned them.
As he sprang to his feet, Jax instructed his system to activate all of its scanning modes. None of them gave him anything beyond the room they were in. “Damn. They have shielding in the walls. We need to move faster.” He headed for the bank of elevators, and the others followed.
Verrand asked, “More security because of the conference, you think?”
“That’s my guess. Ultimately, the why doesn’t matter. If they had known we were coming, they’d have had more, so we haven’t been burned. Just bad luck.” That I invoked with my big mental mouth. “Kimmel, I need you to get control of the elevators if you can. If you can’t, we have options, but they’ll take time.”
The coder’s frustration was evident when he replied, ‘Yeah, about that. The place has a functional AI security system, and it’s aggressive as, uh, hell.” Jax smothered a grin at the man’s self-censorship. “It’s all I can do to prevent the thing from locking down the facility. For now, I’ve convinced it that there are people standing under all the bulkheads, but I have no idea how long I’ll be able to delay it.”
Jax growled, “Okay, then, the hard way. Kimmel, get on the floor behind the security desk. Sirenno, with him. Keep watch and stun anyone who isn’t us, and if the ones we put down move even an inch, hit ‘em again.” The man nodded and moved into the position Jax had assigned him. “Verrand, left elevator first.” They forced the doors apart, and he leaned in and fired an energy blast at the ceiling. The decorative surface shattered and fell to the floor, revealing an access panel at the top. “Up you go.” He made a basket with his hands and she stepped into it, smashed the panel open with the stock of her rifle, and climbed through. “
Whatcha got?”
She said, “Old-school cable assembly.”
He’d been hoping for that. “Explosives at the join point. Set a delay and then get down here before they go boom.” He stepped out into the hallway, and moments later, she landed in the car and launched in a roll through the open doors. He pushed them shut, and the detonation sounded from within. “One down, one to go.”
They repeated the process on the other car, rendering the system unusable to anyone trying to come at them from below. He handed Verrand one of the knockout grenades. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. You and Sirenno take Kimmel and go up the other shaft. Once you’re on top of the elevator, rig the grenade as a trap. Someone opens the panel, it falls in, they fall down. I’ll do the same on the other side. We’ll meet up on three.”
She nodded. “Got it, boss.”
He grinned at the use of the familiar call sign. “Don’t try to talk to me while we’re out of line of sight. If this AI is as sharp as Kimmel says, it’s trying to break into every system we have. Let’s not give it a way in by using broadcast comms unless there’s no other option.” He turned and headed for his objective, confident they would handle their assigned tasks.
Jax forced open the doors of the first car and leapt to grab the lip and pull himself up. He popped the pin on the grenade and wedged it into the partially opened hatch. To do it right, he would have needed the odds and ends kit he normally carried in the field, which had wire and tape and small weights that would have ensured the item would roll into the passenger area. He figured there was probably a three-to-one chance of it working the way he wanted it to, which would have to do.
