Renegades (Expeditionary Force Book 7)

by Craig Alanson

  Except the autogun’s muzzle kept swinging until it pointed down at the floor, and the entire enemy machine slumped. There was a whining sound as its mechanisms powered down. In between breaths, Lauren felt herself shudder involuntarily and she deliberately lifted her finger away from the trigger. “Hold,” she whispered to Roark. “Don’t waste ammo, that thing is dead.”

  “Nope,” the voice of Skippy broke in cheerily. There had been no communication with the annoying beer can since Smythe had sprinted away, his team maintaining strict communications silence to avoid being detected. “I turned it off. Well, technically all I did was sever its connection to the base defense system, but same difference. Anywho,” he announced as Poole and Roark stood up in a wary crouch, “behold, the magic of Skippy the Magnificent! Wow, you made a real mess in there. And you got my combot killed! I am severely disappointed, you are supposed to be elite warriors. I expected you to show me a professional-”

  Poole’s left glove tightened around the rifle’s stock, and she unknowingly echoed a comment from Smythe. “I got something to show you right here. Why don’t you come down here so I can-”

  “Love to, babe, but there is a Bosphuraq in a mech suit coming around the corner so you might want to-”

  Neither Poole nor Roark needed an engraved invitation. With Skippy in full command of the base AI, their suit computers were beginning to receive input from the base’s interior sensors while the Bosphuraq defenders were finding their own sensor inputs missing or unreliable. The birdbrain that stepped cautiously around the corner, placing its feet carefully on the debris-choked floor, was responding to sensor data showing the invaders were all dead. If that Bosphuraq had lived, it would have learned a valuable lesson never to trust a beer can, but alas, a fusilade of armor-piercing and explosive-tipped rounds slammed into it before it could see with its own eyes that its sensor feed was total bullshit.

  With the enemy still falling backwards in a spray of blood, Poole was already leaping through the thin air so by the time the enemy’s helmet rebounded off the floor, she had landed both knees on its chest with her rifle jammed into the neck of its armored suit. A squeeze of the trigger would have sent a three-round burst into the dying enemy, but her rifle judged the second and third rounds were not needed and cut off the ammo feed.

  “Damn,” Roark said softly as the enemy’s helmet and head separated from its body to go spinning off back up the side hallway. “Making sure?”

  “Adrenaline,” Poole explained and was embarrassed by the momentary but understandable breach of discipline, already turning her attention elsewhere. There were no other killbots in sight, the only movement was from two apparently unarmed Bosphuraq down on their knees, gasping for breath in the increasingly thin air. Heavy weapons fire in an above-ground structure was not a good idea for the health and safety of unprotected occupants, she could see tendrils of smoke being whisked away toward holes in the far wall. Without supplemental oxygen, the two enemy would soon be dead of asphyxiation and even if they had oxygen masks, their bodies would swell up, freeze and explode from being exposed to partial vacuum. In an act that was driven in part by mercy and in part by standing mission orders, she quickly put a single round in the heads of each fallen enemy and turned away to focus on the next problem. “Burke! Status?”

  Burke was surprised to hear from Poole, because he had assumed she and Roark would be dead. The last image he had of enemy strength behind him was of two large and powerful killbots and at least one armor-suited biological. When he turned and ran to follow Poole’s orders, he thought his teammates would die to keep the killbots off his heels so he could accomplish their assigned part of the mission even though he was alone. His frantic race toward the control center had been impelled by the fear that a killbot would soon be sent after him, and he had been waiting for his suit’s proximity sensors to warn him of a threat approaching from behind. Alone against a killbot he could not hope to survive, his plan had been to fire his rifle backwards and keep running, trying to get as close to the control center as possible before he was cut down. The whole mission had been screwed up since their Falcon entered the sensor field around the moon, with too few operators available for too many objectives. When Smythe and Frey ran off on their own, Burke feared the team had lost the combat power to penetrate through to the control center and those fears were confirmed when Poole and Roark had been forced to fight a delaying battle against a strong defense. “How are you alive?”

  “Later,” Poole barked. “Progress?”

  “Minimal resistence,” Burke reported. He had encountered only four Bosphuraq along the way and only one of them was armed though not wearing armor. His rifle had made quick work of dispatching all four, and again to his surprise, his faceplate display was showing him two more enemy symbols just around a corner to his left. He was not yet familiar with the new system Skippy had uploaded into his suit so he didn’t know how to tell whether the two Bosphuraq were armed and he didn’t much care. If they weren’t holding weapons as he ran past, they might later get access to weapons and pose a threat to the team behind him and he could not allow that. Saving his precious rockets for future use against hard targets, he held his rifle to the left and squeezed off a short burst as he ran past, the rounds having already been fed targeting coordinates by his suit. By himself, Burke might have been sufficiently accurate to hit the two tall figures who were pounding on and screaming at a stuck door at the end of the short hallway; with semi-guided ammunition he did not need to be concerned about accuracy. The burst of four rounds made his rifle chatter and cut off speech until he was past the side hallway and racing onward. “Two more down,” he reported, knowing Poole would have heard the rifle fire picked up by his suit microphones. “Wait for you?”

  “Negative,” Poole’s voice was strained and Burke could see the symbols representing her and Roark were running flat-out behind him. “Go go go!”

  Smythe’s faceplate lit up with confusing images as Skippy established control over the AI that ran the moonbase, and fed data from the internal sensor network to the STAR team’s suits. “Skippy, this is too much,” Smythe had to put out a hand to steady himself against a wall, the visual barrage was making his eyes unfocus and playing haywire with his inner ear, throwing off his balance.

  “Yeah, yeah, hold your horses, I’m working on it. Um, your display might blue-screen for a moment, I need to tweak the software in your suit computers so it can interpret the data feed and show you only the info you really need. Wow. I thought the Bosphuraq would have better software, whoever wrote that code was a total amateur. What a bunch of-”

  “Skippy!” Smythe interrupted. “We can’t have our suits shutting down to reboot, the team would be vulnerable to-”

  “Your suit already rebooted, if that crude term can be used here. You didn’t notice the blue screen effect because it happened too fast for your visual cortex to register the image. Ok, we’re good, your suit checks out, now I know how to reprogram the other suits, and, done. All team members have updated software.”

  Grinding his teeth at the arrogant and clueless AI, Smythe put aside fantasies of dropping the beer can into a star and scanned the display, which was now showing concise information he needed without extraneous data. Poole’s team had lost their combot and for some reason had split up, with Burke far ahead near the base control center. There was no significant resistance between Burke and that team’s objective, and Poole and Roark had their suits in maximum speed mode to catch up to the lone soldier racing ahead of them. The Delta team was laying waste to their assigned hangar, rifle rounds having torn into every flyable machine at that location. Nunnally, Grudzien and Kloos had encountered resistance before reaching their assigned hangar, but their rockets had blown up one dropship and secondary explosions had taken care of the other two spacecraft in the hangar. “Skippy, do we have access to the control center?”

  “No, the place is locked down tight. The birdbrains in there reacted with impressive speed, I
don’t know if they are trained well or just instinctively moved to save their own asses. Your plan did not anticipate this problem so I do not-”

  “Can you-”

  “Anticipating your next question, by the time Poole arrives, I will have a blast door unlocked and ready to open. To avoid alerting the enemy, I will delay retracting that door until her team is assembled there. You do understand that forcing that door open will unmistakably show the defenders in the control center that they are not merely facing a conventional if shockingly well-prepared and determined attack. That could be a big problem.”

  Smythe hit the button to release the bottom of the backpack he carried, carefully holding onto it as it let go of the upper pack. “Why should we care if the opposition understands the nature of the threat we pose to them?”

  “Because, the Bosphuraq are not stupid. They might guess that we intend to capture the moonbase and use its weapons against the research base on the planet. Please do not interrupt me,” Skippy added as Smythe opened his mouth to do just that. “The big problem is what I just learned from ransacking their computer system. The enemy has a protocol for this very situation, it calls for the command crew here to self-destruct the facility.”

  “Bloody hell.”

  “Making a bad situation worse, the two battlestations have orders to bombard and destroy the moonbase, in the event it is about to fall under enemy control.”

  “Yes, but those battlestations think everything is fine and normal down here, correct? There is no reason for them to suspect anything is wrong down here.”

  “The battlestations are not the problem, I, ugh. Damn, you know, Joe is a particularly dimwitted monkey, but he would have guessed what I’m trying to tell you by now. You are smarter than Joe, how come you haven’t-”

  “Because I don’t bloody have time, beer can. Spell it out for me.”

  “Ok, however I must note that I am very disappointed with you, and this will be noted in your permanent record. Think about this; the duty crew in the command center thinks they have been reporting to the two battlestations that the moonbase has been invaded. When I open that blast door, the duty crew will attempt to self-destruct the base, which will not be a problem because I have a team of maintenance bots unplugging the connections to the explosives, so the duty crew can press all the buttons they want and nothing will happen. What is a problem is that the duty crew will expect the battlestations to follow orders and bombard the moon.”

  Recognition of the danger smacked Jeremy Smythe in the face. “Oh shit.”

  “Aha, you get it now? When maser beams from the orbiting battlestations do not start striking the moonbase, the duty crew will realize something is very wrong, that maybe all their communications have been compromised despite my best efforts to fool them. When that happens, and it surely will happen, the duty crew will launch rockets to pop up transmitters above the stealth field. The instant the battlestations see those communications rockets emerge from the stealth field, they will stop talking and start hitting the moon with everything they have, and it will be game over for you.”

  “You can disable the self-destruct mechanism; can you disable those rockets?”

  “Sadly, no. This is a case when I actually am sad when I say ‘sadly’ instead of being amusingly ironic. Since those rockets were designed as a last-ditch effort, they were also designed to be fail-safe. They use a crude but foolproof solid chemical propellant, and their launch procedure is entirely mechanical. The only way I could intervene is by taking over an enemy bot, and for security, the Bosphuraq do not allow remotely-controlled bots inside the command center. Your only hope is to get into the command center and kill the duty crew so quickly, they do not have time to launch those rockets.”

  “Right.” Smythe may not have the inventive mind of Colonel Bishop, but he was a fast thinker and able to adapt to any situation. “Burke! Halt! Do not approach the command center.”

  Burke had turned the last corner and put on a burst of speed down the last hallway to the command center, mildly dismayed to see the blast door there was closed. That contingency had been planned for, so he reached under his rifle to launch a rocket, selecting armor-penetration mode. A finger of his left hand had tensed to engage the rocket launch trigger when Smythe’s call startled him. Reflexively, his left hand relaxed and he tried to slow his stride, his legs fighting the action of the suit leg motors. The opposing control input confused the suit for a split-second and his legs became entangled, tripping him and throwing him forward to slide on his chest then flipping to slide on his back. Windmilling his arms and legs, he caught the edge of a doorway with one powered glove and its GI Joe Kung Fu grip dug into the door frame, tearing a strip out of the frame and three meters of wall before jerking him to a stop. Burke lost no time with being shocked by the turn of events, he stayed focused by throwing his legs out in front of him and using their momentum to pop himself back to his feet. “Halt, acknowledged. I am,” he checked the numbers in the upper left corner of the faceplate display, “eight meters from the blast door to the command center.”

  “Do not approach, and try not to make any noise there. Poole will join you shortly and Frey and I are on the way. Wait for us, do not take any offensive action.”

  “Understood,” Burke said automatically, though he most certainly did not understand at all. Switching to a private channel, he called Poole. “What is going on?” From the very first briefing about the current mission, it had been emphasized that speed was everything, that nothing could be allowed to slow down their race to their objectives. That is why Burke had run ahead, thinking he had left Poole and Roark behind to die. Now he was just supposed to wait?

  “It’s a fluid situation,” Lauren advised, using soldier-speak to say the team was now making shit up as they went along. If there was a new master plan for the new reality they were confronted with, she was confident Smythe would inform her when she needed to know. She did not have confidence that a new master plan existed yet.

  “Open that door,” Smythe ordered, covering the hallway forward while Frey dropped to one knee and turned the manual latch to unlock the door that came up only to her waist. As Smythe thought, the door provided access to mechanisms inside that wall, and there was plenty of space for the small pack that contained one end of the microwormhole. As Frey took the pack and stuffed it into a corner behind the door, there was a protest.

  “Hey!” Skippy shouted. “What are you monkeys doing? I still need that wormhole, duh.”

  “We are leaving it here because the wormhole is vital,” Smythe explained. “It will be safe hidden behind that door. If I carry it around and I am hit-”

  “Ooh, good point,” Skippy mumbled sheepishly. “Ok, yep, the wormhole will be fine in there. You two crazy kids have fun on your date, make sure you are home by ten o’clock.”

  Smythe bristled at the beer can making light of the situation. “This is not a-”

  “I’ve had worse dates,” Frey observed while latching the door securely closed and unslinging her rifle. “Ready, Sir.”

  “Right,” Smythe felt awkward though he had no reason to. “Frey, you take point.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Safely and frustratingly aboard the Flying Dutchman, I was not liking what I heard and saw. “Skippy,” I called.

  “Kinda busy here, Joe.”

  “Yeah, I heard about the crossword puzzle, you little shithead. Your ginormous brain can multitask. Listen, I do not want to be a Chairborne Ranger asshole and tell Smythe what he should do while he’s on the scene and I’m up here-”

  “But you will power through your angst and be an asshole anyway?”

  “No,” I pounded the arm of the command chair with a fist, “I am not doing that. What I will do is provide him with options, if I can. I do not see any way for his team to get into that control center and kill every birdbrain in there before even one of them can launch one of those signal rockets and blow the whole operation.” A detailed schematic of the cont
rol center was now on the main bridge display, I got out of my chair and walked over to look at it closely. It was impossible, truly, absolutely impossible for Smythe’s team, for any group humans or any species we knew of, to get from one of the blast doors all the way into the heart of the control center before someone in there could launch a signal rocket. Those damned rocket launch controls are in four places scattered around the heart of the control center, and there was no way, no physical way, for even the fastest, most determined assault team to cross the distance from any of the blast doors to get clear shots and take out all nine Bosphuraq who worked at consoles in the heart of the control complex. Plus there were another twelve birdbrains who surely would run toward the heart of the control center when they saw a blast door sliding upward and heard rifle fire.

  Impossible situations were nothing new to the Merry Band of Pirates, but not even Smythe’s razor-sharp team from previous missions could have accomplished the task quick enough. No offense to our current SpecOps team, but they were new to the crew and had trained together for only a short time and this was their first real operation, so it is understandable that I lacked full confidence in their abilities. It didn’t matter anyway, because no team of humans or Ruhar or even Maxolhx that I knew of was capable of doing what needed to be done.