Authors: Dain White
“Ready?”
“On the right, Yak, cover me”, I called, and hooked in. A few rounds glanced off my suit, but they were hardly noticeable. I scanned four targets behind barricades near the end of the corridor, working a crew-served automatic weapon. I charged and fired, reducing the end of the corridor to a flash of light and fury.
“Cover you? You hardly need
—” his words were cut off by a mighty explosion that hurled him off his feet and threw him back through the opening. A hail of kinetics screamed down the corridor through the smoke at the end of the hall, shredding the bulkhead behind me into nothingness.
I
leaned out a little bit and scanned the corridor, tracking a heavily armored walker approaching us through the smoke.
“
Ouch”, Yak replied from somewhere uncomfortable and significantly downrange.
Since he was alive enough to make jokes, I decided to deal with the walker first and check on hi
m later.
Keeping mostly flat against the wall, I sighted in on the walker and willed it to go away – and was immediately rewarded by a mighty blast that rippled the deck plates and blew back down the corridor, knocking me off my feet and into
what remained of the bulkhead. When the smoke cleared, the explosion had warped the corridor completely; the blackened area where the walker had stood bulged grotesquely into the breached compartments and access spaces around the area.
A layer of smoke and haze filled the upper corridor as a fire burned somewhere.
“Clear”, I said unnecessarily.
“Holy cow, Jane… yo
u’re going to flash cook us if you’re not careful”, he said, climbing up through the wreckage we had just carved through, visible through what was left of the shredded bulkhead behind me.
“I know, aren’t they sweet?” I giggled.
“Nothing says ‘I Love You’ quite like these babies. Although, that wasn’t even a kiloton… we can hit quite a bit harder.”
I split my vie
w ahead and behind, and kept an eye down the corridor, while watching him pull himself out of the wreckage of the bunker he had been blown into. My head ached at the visual, but I was slowly getting used to it.
“Good to go Jane, rolling up” he said after kicking hims
elf free of a tangle of wiring and lifting off.
“Covering”, I replied.
His mimetics were lit, but as covered with dust and soot as he was, they weren’t doing too much. Not that we had any chance at all of stealth at this point. Red knew we were here, and hopefully, he was afraid.
Yak had reached the end of the corridor, and took a position near what remained of the plasteel barricade. “Covering”, he called out.
“Rolling up”, I replied, and sailed down the corridor. “How’re we looking?” I asked as I came in for a landing on the opposite corner of the next bulkhead.
“Nothing out there that I can see, Jane, but it’s a pretty big place.” He leaned carefully out to check the corners.
“Em, please advise; are there hostiles at our location?”
“
Yes, Yak, a significant number of targets are massed ahead of you, they are plotted onscreen to the best of my ability.”
I opened the track and flipped through the targets as fast as I could think… t
here were an awful lot of them. This section had a galley forward, and on the starboard side, a head. An upper walkway led to the deck above, and a ratway dropped down to the deck below.
“Thanks
Em, it looks like they’re set up in a pretty classic post. Not much else you can do in the space. Are you seeing this, Jane?”
“Copy, Yak. It’s a killbox. We need to
probably try to avoid any mines, and work our way to the high ground.”
“
Think a mine would be enough to kill us?”
I nodded. “A real mine would probably vaporize us, but they’d have to be suicidal to use one in here. I don’t think your standard AP mine would do much to us, but a tank mine would be more than enough to ruin our day.”
“Well, call out if you see one”, he said in a somber voice.
I laughed. “Don’t worry Yak;
I won’t let you check out. Captain Smith handed me a direct order, in writing.”
He chuckled, and I continued, “There’s really nothing to worry about anyway… w
e ought to be able to sneak up on them, Yak. We just need to find some way to tidy up”, I said while thinking back down the corridor for any heads we might have missed.
“Well, that’s the mess, so what we want is in there.”
I nodded, looking around for anything we could use to wipe down our suits.
“Wait a minute
, Jane… wait.” He started rubbing his hands across his suit, and suddenly, water poured out of his palms.
“Are you serious?” I said, laughing. “Janis, did you know we would need to
do this?”
“It seemed the best solution, Jane. Use sparingly, you only have five
liters.”
I went to work on my suit, smiling all the while. Even the worst of the spots cleaned right up, once the regenerative metal had a chance to cook for a while.
“I have a dent”, Yak said sadly.
“Impressive. That was a big hit, Yak. Did it hurt?”
“No, not really, in fact, it felt no worse than taking a pretty bad tumble. I should have been dust, Jane. The suit must be preactive… no other way it would lock like that. The emitters too, they just fire off and absorb the impact… or most of it.”
“Well, that’s good to know. You’re looking pretty much gone
now with your halo off.”
“My what
…?”
“Your halo
…”
A moment of silence, then he replied “
So I can be evil now?”
“What?”
“I don’t have my halo?”
“Oh!” I laughed. “That’s how I am able to track you with your mimetics on.”
He laughed. “Jane, I thought… that’s hilarious. You show up for me as a green target. Did you know that you can highlight organs?”
“We can?” I said, immediately seeing his
and shrieking in delight.
He looked at me a little strangely.
“You know, we should get to work.”
“
Yep… what do you think they’re doing right now?”
He replied somberly,
“Besides planning on killing us?”
“Yeah
…”
He was silent for a moment. “
They’re probably dying inside, Jane. Thinking about their lives, the fight for survival, the things they did wrong… hell, I don’t much care. These aren’t people.”
“
Amen, Yak.” I replied softly.
“Cover”
“Covering”, I replied, and watched him slide into the room to the left. I followed him slowly, hanging back as we moved into the room.
The lights were off, but not for us. About five meters into the room, someone ahead of us
coughed slightly, and the sound bounced off the surfaces like a compression blast.
“Did you see that”, Yak hissed.
“Mm-hmm”, I replied.
“Targets updated”,
Emwan said softly.
“Copy”, Yak said softly, and halted at the foot of the walkway, pointing down. He had spotted a series mine, a particularly nasty little piece of hardware.
“Hold on Yak.” I called, and disarmed the mine. “Can’t leave this live, it’d kill someone.”
He shook his head, and moved up the walkway like a breath of air. The silence in the room was oppressive, but as I strained to listen, I suddenly heard breathing and… heartbeats. Almost before I could think of i
t, they were plotted and locked. Suddenly I could see their positions clearly; waiting for us to enter the room, so they could light up the companionway.
They were everywhere.
“Hold”, I called out, waiting for Yak to pop a squat. “Yak, if you listen as hard as you can, you’ll hear their heartbeats. Once you hear them, plot them so you can see where they are. Do you see the walkers?”
“
Yeah, they have a pretty decent range on us too, considering. There are rifles set up on the second floor, see them?”
“
Yeah.”, I whispered.
“
You can hear them breathing too, Jane”, he said softly. “You haven’t already been tracking them?”
“Only when Janis updated the data…” I trailed off.
“Sorry Jane, I thought you had done that too”, he replied. “We need to powwow about these suits. We need to get on the same page here.”
“I agree, but now, we need to
take out the trash. Are you ready?”
“Are you?”
I reached down and tapped my knife.
“Nice.”
*****
“How’s it looking up there Janis”, Dak asked on comms. Pauli and I were watching some of the kids play in the bridge stations and laughing.
“It is going well, sir. I must say Jane and Yak are performing flawlessly, sir.”
“They’re pretty gung-ho, Janis”, he replied, watching a close match between me and a little a little fellow with missing front teeth, shooting asteroid
s on Pauli’s screens. He had me beat, solid.
“It is not without challenges, but they are rising to every situation, sir.”
“Are they in any danger?”
She paused for the briefest moment. “We are all in danger, sir. They are in a considerably higher amount of danger, but they are safe.”
*****
She ghosted along the walkway, about a half meter clear of the deck. I followed her a little higher. The first sniper was set up with a little turret for cover, but Jane floated over to it and turned it off
, like the consummate professional that she was.
What a woman.
She was about enough to make your heart skip a beat.
I watched with quiet detachment, as s
he slowly drew up over the prone sniper, moving like a ghost in the air above him. She lingered there for a moment, and then in a brief flash, pulled her stun knife and sunk it to the hilt into the back of his helmet, charging the blade.
The effect was immediate. He died without knowing why, or how. She waved me on, and took up overwatch. A little further along the walkway, a gunner and his loader were set up, the first of many, and each of them died the same way; screaming voicelessly in their heads as they faded into the dark.
Once the upper catwalk was clear, we split up and floated towards the walkers. Mine was posted up behind a barricaded strongpoint, with clear fields of fire and another mounted weapon. Following Jane’s lead, I ascended until I was positioned over the top of the walker, up against the catwalk above.
“Ready?”
“Go in 3… 2… 1…” I said, charging and firing at the zero point. The walkers blew apart into a whirring, snapping, hissing pile of shrapnel, bathing the room in high speed hunks of molten metal.
From above, the shrapnel
burst outward across the room. It nearly vaporized the masses of men emplaced in this end of the room, grievously wounding the rest. The blast set off every mine in the room at once, adding to the cacophony.
As we held the high ground and the flank, we were completely in control.
We followed up with selective destruction, a shot at a time, one after the other. I had motion tracking up, a sonic layer, heat and organs. My target selection was ultimate.
We worked through the room until there were no more targets, and stood in silence for a few moments.
“Clear”, I breathed.
“Clear…
Em, I am not showing any other targets. Do you have anything else plotted?”
“
Jane, there are no hostile targets remaining. This was their last stand.”
“Where is Red?”
“He is among the colonists. Please follow your route aft. That was some mighty nice shooting, Jane.”
*****
“I wish we could do something”, I said, filling the captain’s cup again.
“We are doing something, Pauli. We’re being hospitable. These poor people are traumatized, mister. Do you think they need aerobatics and explosions in their lives? We need to let them do their job, son.”
I nodded, he was right, though I realized that didn’t mean I had to like it.
*****
The route we followed was quiet and empty, though I did slow us down a bit by disabling the various traps I found. Pressure fields, IR beams and even old fashioned molecular tripwire wouldn’t work on us. It didn’t even occur to them that we wouldn’t be walking. On a ship this size, people walked around compensated to .75 all the time.
At the hatch, Yak stopped and held his hand up, then waved it across his face. I nodded.
He signaled forward to the next bulkhead, and pumped his hand – we moved out.