by Marko Kloos
Idina led her section up the staircase behind the canteen that was now ablaze from one end of the room to the other. They made it to the floor above before the way was blocked by burning debris. Above their heads, Idina could see that the staircase simply ended in a ragged and twisted jumble of torn steel supports before it reached the next floor. She turned to Dahl.
“Is there another way up?”
Dahl surveyed the scene above and shook her head slowly.
“This is the main stairwell. Maybe there is an emergency staircase left intact somewhere on the other side of the atrium. But I would not count on it. If we get trapped in one of those, we are finished.”
“Colors,” Corporal Shakya said. “If they’re up there and they’re not showing up on the network, they’re beyond our help.”
“Gods-damn it,” Idina cursed. For a hot and angry moment, she was hoping for a few of the Odin’s Wolves insurgents to show up in her field of view so she could vent her rage at them with her rifle.
“If the hallway behind us is still intact, we can get to the corner staircase that way,” Dahl suggested. “We can go back to the lower level and sweep the floor from the southwest. Kill whoever needs killing, save whoever needs saving.”
Despite her anger, Idina flashed a grin at Dahl’s statement.
“You sounded like a Palladian just now.”
“Let’s go, Colors,” Shakya said. “We’re no use to anyone up there. But we may get some of the civvies out of the lower level before this whole place drops on our heads.”
Idina looked at the faces of the troopers around her. She knew that she could order them into the fires above, and they would obey her without hesitation. But she had lost three of them already today, three young brigade soldiers who would never return to Pallas except in a burial capsule, and she wasn’t about to add the rest of Red Section to that count without a hope of success in return. Above, the mortally wounded building creaked and groaned as if to lend its weight to Corporal Shakya’s argument. She bit her lip and turned away from the destroyed staircase.
“Down that hallway to the southwest corner, just like the captain said. Shakya, take the lead.”
The rooms on the lower level were mostly empty. This was the part of the building farthest from the explosion, and the people working in these had been able to escape. Idina’s team cleared the floor room by room. Several of the offices were locked with security panels that would not accept Idina’s Alliance override codes, and she had Dahl unlock them. It was obvious that people had left in a hurry during the evacuation, and whatever hadn’t been knocked over by the explosion had been overturned or flung aside on the way out.
They didn’t encounter the first bodies until they were in the offices closest to the atrium, where a row of large windows that separated the rooms from the hall beyond had been blown in and shattered. Half a dozen bloodied bodies were sprawled on the floor or slumped over desks. Some of them were obviously dead, staring at the ceiling with sightless eyes. Idina and her section fanned out into the room to check the others for signs of life while Corporal Shakya stood guard with his weapon at the ready. After five minutes of grim, silent triage, Idina knew that everyone on the ground in this room was beyond saving, killed by the flying glass or the concussion of the explosion that had thrown unprepared bodies against walls and furniture with immense force.
High above them, there was a loud and drawn-out shrieking and groaning, the noises of tortured steel. Then something large and hot crashed down into the middle of the atrium on the other side of the row of broken windows.
“All Alliance units in the building, this is QRF lead,” a voice came over the guard channel. “Abort your sweeps and get out. We have an imminent structural collapse. I repeat, get out now.”
“Affirmative,” Idina replied. “On the way.”
Next to her, Dahl was bent over a dead woman who looked to be maybe half her age. She threw aside the medkit she had been holding in her hand and let out an incoherent sound of rage.
“You heard the man,” Idina said to her troops. “Red Section, leave everything and move out. Let’s go, let’s go.”
She knelt down in front of Dahl and offered her hand.
“You too, Captain. You won’t be able to get your vengeance if you die in here with them.”
Dahl’s dismayed expression did not change, but after a moment, she grabbed Idina’s offered hand and allowed herself to be pulled to her feet.
Together, they climbed through the nearest window frame and dashed across the atrium, following the troopers of Red Section who were already halfway to the exit. All around them, the building continued its drawn-out, noisy death as they ran.
Outside, it looked like every Alliance unit on the planet had gathered. Idina didn’t make it three steps beyond the threshold of the outer door before several troopers converged on her and Dahl, providing help to spirit them away from the police building as quickly as possible. To her, it seemed that her boots didn’t touch the ground more than twice during the dash to the next intersection. Here, someone had parked three armored combat transports in a line to provide cover from the direction of the police building. Several medics rushed toward her and Dahl as soon as they cleared the barrier.
“Are you all right, Color Sergeant?”
“I’m fine,” Idina replied. “A little singed, that’s all. Check on the captain over there. She wasn’t wearing hardshell.” She indicated the spot where Dahl stood bent over, catching her breath. The Gretian woman waved them off.
“I am not fine,” she said. “But I am not injured.”
The medics moved on. Idina watched Dahl as she was getting her breathing under control. Over at the police headquarters, there was a sound like a deep exhalation, then a shrill screech of twisting metal. A part of the remaining section of the upper floors collapsed and fell inward in a shower of sparks that whirled wildly in the updraft from the fires. They observed the inferno silently.
“This is the end for them,” Idina said after a while. “Odin’s Wolves. They don’t know it yet. But they’ve just finished themselves.”
Dahl gave her a long look.
“I hope that is true,” she replied. “But that is my home burning over there. My friends. My family. Right now I feel that the Wolves are winning.”
“Colors Chaudhary?”
Idina turned toward the sound of her name to see a Rhodian QRF trooper trotting up and coming to a halt behind them.
“Yes, Private?”
“QRF Actual would like a word, if you have a moment.”
Idina gave Dahl an apologetic look.
“Sure. Where is he?”
“At the incident command post, over there in the back of the C3 Badger.” He pointed at the nearby vehicle.
“I’ll be back,” she said to Dahl. “Please don’t leave before I’ve had a chance to talk to you again.”
“I will be here for a while, I think,” Dahl replied.
Idina nodded and went to follow the Rhodian private back to the command vehicle.
The commanding officer of the QRF company was a wiry little Rhodian captain with a jawline that looked like he chewed a bowl of steel bolts for breakfast every morning. He was standing at the back of the command Badger, half a dozen screen projections open in front of him that he didn’t bother closing when she walked up.
“Color Sergeant Chaudhary, Pallas Brigade. You asked to see me, sir?”
“I did,” the captain said. “Captain Shaw, Rhodian Army. You were with the deputy high commissioner this morning?”
“We were acting as augmentation for his security team.”
“You were in the building when the bomb went off,” he said. “We’ll get the data from your armor, of course. But I wanted to get your assessment.”
“My assessment,” Idina replied, “is that they caught us with our pants down again. Someone had eyeballs on us the whole way from the Green Zone. That gyrofoil with the bomb arrived right after we got there. The DHC and
his escort went up top to meet with the Gretians. We stayed down to keep an eye on things at ground level. And three minutes later, the place went up.”
“I don’t think so,” Captain Shaw said. “Their ground element wasn’t expecting to run into you. Maybe the timing was just coincidence. They wanted to cripple the police. You just happened to be there.”
“We’re still one step behind. We’re always one step behind. And I’ve lost three more of my people to them. They’re slowly grinding us down.”
The captain nodded. “Insurgency basics. Damage the occupiers’ morale, keep them in fear, erode their support back home.”
“Well, it’s working pretty well, sir.”
“That’s because we’ve spent the last six months reacting instead of acting, Sergeant.” An alert went off on one of the screens in front of him, and he glanced at it and silenced it with a quick swipe of his finger.
“No offense, sir, but you really don’t want to hear my opinion on that particular subject.”
“Try me.” He turned to face her fully and folded his arms in front of his chest. “You’re not in the QRF. You aren’t downstream in my chain of command. We’re not even in the same service. Have at it.”
If you insist, Idina thought.
“I should be out there looking for these people and hunting them down one by one. Instead, I’ve spent the last few weeks on babysitting assignments and fence patrols,” she said. “That’s a waste of time. Whoever decided to cancel the JSP missions is a fucking idiot. We need to root these Odin’s Wolves bastards out from their home turf. We have absolutely no hope of doing that without the Gretian police. If we just keep doing what we’ve been doing, we might as well pack up and go home. All of us.”
The Rhodian captain shook his head and smiled wryly.
“That is almost word for word what I told the general. Only he didn’t ask my opinion before I offered it.”
Idina shifted uncomfortably.
“It’s the gods-damned truth, sir. Just because command isn’t listening doesn’t mean we should stop pointing it out.”
“Fortunately, it looks like someone is finally listening, Sergeant.”
Overhead, a medical gyrofoil roared past at low altitude, momentarily drowning out all the nearby noise and chatter, and they waited for a few moments until the craft had disappeared behind the nearest line of rooftops.
“You’ve got a bit of a reputation in the JSP,” Captain Shaw continued. “I’m about to hand over the QRF command to someone else. I’ve been charged with putting together a new unit. And I want you to be a part of it.”
Idina blinked in surprise.
“What kind of unit, sir?”
“A task force,” he said. “Outside of the usual demarcations. I’m pulling in people from all over the place. QRF, special ops, field intelligence. Rhodian and Palladian, joint ops. I was hoping you could help me get some of the Gretians on board. You’ve done a bunch of work with them in the last few months. I figure you probably know a few who are up for the challenge.”
Idina glanced back at Dahl, who was now standing next to a rescue pod and talking to the Gretian medics inside.
“I may know somebody,” she said. “But my CO is already keen to send me home on medical retirement. I doubt he’ll sign off on a transfer.”
“If I put your name in the hat, that won’t be a problem.”
“People from all over the place,” she repeated. “Doing what, exactly?”
“Crossing lines,” he said. “Going out there and hunting down Odin’s Wolves. With all the assets we need, and none of the shackles. No guard duty. No babysitting assignments. Just the best people from across all the services. We gather the intelligence, we analyze it, we do the tracking work on the ground. We decide which doors to kick in, and when. We’ve been fighting this on their terms. It’s past time we started to play the game their way, don’t you think?”
Over at the burning police headquarters, another section of wall collapsed. This one fell outward, tumbling down the front of the building and crashing onto the plaza in front of the main entrance lock. By now, there were firefighting pods all around the building, and several of them directed thick streams of foam at the burning pile of rubble from roof-mounted dispensers. Overhead, drones were dumping their own foam payloads into the middle of the conflagration. Somewhere in there, three more of her troopers were entombed in the structure, young men that had looked to her for guidance and leadership, three more names on a list that would remain carved into her brain until the day she died.
Nothing I can do will bring them back, she thought. But maybe I can see to it that the list doesn’t grow longer.
“I think we should go and collect some pelts,” she said.
CHAPTER 23
DUNSTAN
“Well, that worked better than I expected,” Lieutenant Hunter said dryly.
On the screen projection above the tactical display, the Gretian heavy cruiser drifted through space, its drive cone extinguished. Dozens of escape pods were littering the area around the hull. As Dunstan watched the feed from the optical sensors, several more pods launched from the warship on the bright plumes of their ignited solid-fuel booster rockets.
“System says that was the last bunch of pods,” Lieutenant Robson reported. “If there’s anyone left on that ship, they have no way off now.”
“They had their warning. Bring their life support offline. We’ll keep it there until someone with a boarding team gets here,” Dunstan said.
“Aye, sir. Shutting down life support on all decks.”
“And keep us well clear of that hull. I don’t want to be near it if someone’s arming a nuclear scuttling charge over there right now.”
The tactical display was dotted with the emergency beacons from the pods. Nearby, the two other Odin’s Ravens ships were drifting, trailing long arcs of debris and frozen air from their damaged stern sections.
“Give them fair notice, Number One,” Dunstan said. “Tell them to shut their mouths and sit on their hands.”
Lieutenant Hunter nodded and tapped her comms screen.
“Attention, remaining ships,” she sent. “We are still tracking you with some very big guns. Do not attempt to maneuver or use your communications gear. If you take any evasive or offensive actions at all, you will be destroyed without further warning.”
Dunstan leaned back in his gravity couch and exhaled sharply. He knew from experience that it would take the better part of an hour for the adrenaline to ebb again, and that nothing he could do would get rid of the shakes he felt any sooner.
“Thirty-three pods,” Hunter said. “And two ships with gods-know-how-many people still on them. We wouldn’t be able to collect everyone even if we wanted.”
“We may have just fought the most decisive engagement in the history of space warfare,” Dunstan mused.
“If we had half a dozen of these, we could run space control for the entire system without breaking a sweat,” Lieutenant Robson said.
“If we had half a dozen of these, we’d be broke,” Dunstan replied. “But I don’t think you are wrong, Lieutenant. How far out are the other Alliance ships in the sector? Cerberus and Pelican?”
“Two point one and two point seven hours at full burn, sir.”
“Let them know we’ve captured three Odin’s Ravens ships. And let fleet command know where we are and what we’re doing. Those two ships may not have enough brig space to hold that many prisoners.”
“There’s one problem I never thought I’d have,” Lieutenant Hunter said. “Having to deal with too many surrendering ships.”
“I’m surprised they folded so quickly,” Armer said from his station, where targeting markers for the ship’s retractable gun mount were littering the screen.
“Dying for your cause is a pretty abstract concept, Lieutenant,” Dunstan replied. “It becomes a lot more real when you’re told you have three minutes to choose between a rescue pod and suffocation.”
�
��They must know that we can still shoot those pods to pieces.”
“They went into those pods because they know we probably won’t. Because we’re the Rhodian Navy.” Dunstan looked at the cloud of emergency beacons surrounding the abandoned Gretian cruiser. “But it’ll be over five hours before our backup gets here to collect all those pods out of space. I’ll be happy to let these people sweat the probabilities for a bit. Get me a tight-beam to Zephyr. I want to see how they are doing.”
“Our reactor took a hit,” Zephyr’s comms officer said over the tight-beam connection a minute later. “All our high-power systems are out. We’re running on the backup power cells.”
“Can you get it fixed on your own, Mr. Jansen?” Dunstan asked.
“Our engineer says probably not. She’s still taking stock of the damage. But she thinks our torus jacket got holed in that last exchange. That’s beyond anyone’s field repair skills. You can’t just weld a patch to it.”
“I see.” Dunstan exchanged a look with his first officer. “We have two Alliance ships on the way to render assistance. How long can you keep afloat on your backup power?”
“A good while. But there’s no telling what else got bent when we took that hit. The captain says she’d feel much better if we had a power and oxygen umbilical connected to our ship as soon as possible.”
Lieutenant Hunter made the hand signal to mute the feed, and Dunstan tapped the audio field.
“You know how classified this ship is, sir,” she said. “We can’t allow anyone through our airlock and let them get a good look around.”
“I won’t take anyone aboard, Number One. But we can probably justify a tow assist and some spare juice. Maybe have someone from our engineering section go over there and see if they can lend a hand.”
“That’s a risk, sir. Just noting my concern for the record.”
“And I have made note of it. But if they need assistance, we’re obliged to assist. And I’d say we owe them the help. After they played bait for us the way they did.”
