Assault on Ambrose Station: A Seth Donovan Novel (32 page)

We got to the gap between platforms and jumped, easily clearing it. I nearly fell over when I landed, my feet skidding across a mangled Jaani corpse. We set up before the barricades, using their own fortifications against them. The main doors opened and a pair of grenades flew out, bouncing off the barricade. Someone shouted a warning and I ducked down. The explosion sent more corpse giblets flying.

“Geko!” I called, “Get a door knocker on that hatch! Bravo and Charlie, in ten seconds!”

We split into our respective teams, Geko unclipping the small rocket launcher from his utility belt. It resembled Artemis’ ballistic launcher and it wasn’t too different in operation, only these were single use weapons.

“Fire in the hole!” Geko called. With a pop, the handgun-sized weapon fired a single rocket at the door, punching a hole the size of a fist in the hatch. A split second later, it seemed that the very fabric of space around the hatch seemed to ripple, then the steel doorway burst apart with a dull thud and screeching tear. I threw my last grenade through the opening, and so did Artemis.

Bellows of pain followed the blasts, and we were up on our feet rushing the opening. As we got to the breach, the other door knockers hit. The accompanying
thoom!
drowning out the yelling from inside.

I was first through, firing at a reeling pair of Ghantri clutching at wounds. As they went down, I kicked over a shattered desk and knelt down, quickly taking in my surroundings. The room was ten metres wide, with a mezzanine level at the rear. Office desks were all over the floor, with writhing Ghantri scattered everywhere. More were on the mezzanine, safe from out concussive blasts. They began firing down on us.

The other teams joined us, pushing through into the compartment. The farthest team leapt up onto the mezzanine from below, unimpeded by incoming fire. I had split up the entry points so that at least one of us would have a chance at flanking any defenders, and now it was paying dividends. The Ghantri turned to face the incoming threat, but it was too late. Renthal finished off the last of them as it tried to leap down into the main floor, he simply jumped down after it and used the strength of his exo-rig to stomp on the Ghantri from above. A couple of well-placed rounds finished the job.

“Rhondel’s down.” said the calm voice of Kekkin, standing over a fallen M4 suit.

I rushed over and knelt beside the still form, checking him over. He had left his helmet open, as some of the troops often do, and his helmet was pooling with blood from a wound on his neck.

Glassy, unseeing eyes stared back.

53.

It was a clean hit. The projectile had gone right through the weak padding around Rhondel’s neck and out the other side. Kekkin said he saw him stumble and was going to yell at him to keep his footing when he saw him fall. A glance as he passed told him all he needed to know.

“Warrior died well.” he said solemnly.

The others had gathered around, checking each other for wounds. Gunther had caught a piece of shrapnel in his left glove, nearly severing his little finger. Triptych reported difficulty breathing, but a brief check revealed he only had a bruised rib. The rest of them had bruises where their armour had taken rounds. For once, I’d managed to avoid taking any hits.

I tried to gauge the mood of the squad, to see how Rhondel’s death had affected them. They were quiet, going through the motions, checking their gear. I thought back to the outburst I had first witnessed when I had first met them, all the way back at the Jump Station.

“Renthal,” I said, motioning him over to a spot apart from the rest.

“Sir?” he said when we were out of earshot.

“I need to know if anyone is going to take this harder than usual.”

“No sir. We’re copacetic.”

“Bullshit. One of your buddies just died.”

He gave me a hard look, but I wasn’t buying it.

“What do you want me to say?”

“How does Naga Team handle casualties?”

“We deal with it, just like any other soldier.”

“Want to tell me about Tucker?”

He sighed, looked down at his boots and then back up at me.

“Before we knew the Jaani were combatants, we’d captured four of them when we hit this listening post on the other side of Nsarri. Ormund had Tucker guard them, wanted them treated like civilians. I mean, they look like cute little aliens…”

“I get that. What happened?”

“Kekkin wanted them shot, couldn’t afford to babysit them. Ormund over rode him, he thought they were slaves just like the people here. Got Tucker to sit down with them and try to talk with them. Tucker was good like that. He was our negotiator, our field medic. A real smooth dude, you know? So Ormund has the rest of us finish our sweep, only found a couple of Ghantri, we planted some charges and made our way back to the waypoint. Two dead Jaani and one dead Tucker. We detected a life pod launch, but there’s these Protectorate conventions on firing at life pods, you see?”

“What did Ormund say?”

“He said we must have missed a Ghantri, that we fucked up. Kekkin and him had a row. Got real noisy. I know it was just the two of them tripping out on what happened. How were we to know?”

“How did the rest of the squad handle it?”

“Like what you’re seeing now. We’re professionals. We understand that what we do is dangerous. It just gets to some of us sometimes, especially when we screw up like with Tucker.”

“I’m sorry about Rhondel. I hardly knew him. What was he like?”

“Don’t sweat it. We’ll grieve later, when we can. It wasn’t your fault. You did everything right out there. Kekkin will probably try and have a word with you later about your command style though.”

“What do you mean?”

“He thinks you shouldn’t be at the front of every attack.”

I smiled. “I get that a lot from Zoe and Max.”

“I think it’s inspiring. It’s a change from the usual milk drinkers the Protectorate foists on us.”

“You have a history of ineffective leaders?”

“Commanding a spec ops team is a big career move. It’s the ground pounder’s equivalent of commanding a corvette in the fleet. It’s 90% tactics, 10% action. Well, normally.”

“And Ormund?”

“He’s okay, just very young. I think he got the top job because of his daddy.”

“He’s inner system?”

“Oh yeah. Tenth or twelfth in line for his family’s name. His pop is some bigwig diplomat for the Votus Collective in Votus II. Most of us were drawn from the system’s forces.”

“How come he doesn’t use his full honorific?”

“I think he’s ashamed of it, to be honest.”

“Where was Rhondel from?”

“Ilos, I think.”

“You think?”

“He kept to himself, mostly. Was chummy with Gunther and Geko, but otherwise a quiet trooper. Hell of a knife guy, though.”

He bowed his head in silence, and I gripped his shoulder before I walked back to the squad. Kekkin nodded to me, while Artemis and I briefly made eye contact.

“Triptych is jacking the node.” said Harris.

“Good. How’s that hand, Gunther?” I asked.

“Hurts like a bitch, but I can handle it.”

“Can you shoot?”

“No problem, sir.”

“He couldn’t before,” said Masters, “Maybe it will improve your aim?”

“I can still shoot this!” he said, grabbing his crotch.

“You shoot blanks, or I’m a Frikk wet nurse.”

I let them blow off steam. Despite their reassurances, I was still an outsider and I needed them to come to terms with one of their teammates dying. I had a feeling more of us would fall before this was over.

So far, we’d killed over forty Ghantri but I knew there were literally thousands living within the substructure of Ambrose. The only way I’d gotten through this last time was by forgetting who I was, ignoring my own wounded mind and grief. I knew that I had healed, somewhat, since then but I did not relish the thought of going through some of that pain again. Not when I knew what kind of a shell it would leave me.

I thought about isolating myself from the others, only connecting from a purely military aspect to issue commands and talk tactics. If I had grown too attached, would my mind snap once more? Would my PTSD return in full force? I realised that I could not abandon these men for my own sake, though. If I could not face this as I am, what right did I have to ask them to do the same? I needed to support them in any way that I could.

I reported in to Ormund, told him of Rhondel’s status and asked him to pass on my love to Zoe.

I also need some specs on this mag rail system,
I sent,
sending you some images of the contacts and power junctions.

Looks like a standard DonCrest Monopolar Cyclo-One system. What do you need?

There’s a fair amount of salvageable tech lying around, can we build a jury-rigged car for the rail?

Take a wander around, snap up some pics of some of the stuff and I’ll see if Elias can make something of it.

Can you also get your two enlisted to search out where this system leads to?

“Seth!” called Kekkin as he and Triptych headed over to me, “
Naga-zak
needs to hear this.”

“What is it?”
Hold on Ormund, linking you up to audio.

Receiving.

The Malforian was holding a small electronics box with several cables dangling from it. “I found this linked up to the comms node.”

“What is it?”

“A signal jumper. Short range, high bandwidth wireless connection. There’ll be another somewhere that was paired with this one.”

“So? What’s the significance of this?”

“They’re used on capital ship networks, to turn the hull into a transmission line for shipwide comms. Just plug one of these into your main communications system, then attach one to the hull and repeat the process at the far end of the ship. You can send large packets of data anywhere on the ship, then. Like holo, hardlight projections, or large data feeds of any kind.”

“Would it work on something like the habitat super structure?”

“Don’t think so, too much signal loss for that.”

“What about the mag rail?”

“Yeah. That would be perfect. It’s a superconductor so it will definitely be an excellent transmission conduit.”

“Good. Put it back.”

“What? But I found this hidden on the node…”

“Which means whoever was at the end of that mag rail has an idea that we’re here already. We’re going to use it when we get there to stretch our own comms line. What’s the range of that system?”

“Theoretically, if it did use the mag rail, several thousand kilometres…” as his voice trailed off, I could tell he began to understand.

If we managed to capture the other end of this comms line, we could use the entire mag rail system to provide a steady line of communications to Ormund. We’d effectively be using the entire station as a giant antenna.

You get all that?

Yeah. If only you had a softlight projector, I could give you real time imagery of the tactical situation.

I do. I can create softlight holograms with my nano-proliferation.

Oh. Yeah, that would work. I’ll liase with Zoe and see if we can create a program. Can you link Tac into this connection? We’ll use you as a router.

I motioned for Tac to come over.

“Tac, I need you to talk with Zoe and Ormund on getting my Softlight Holo Paradigm to talk with my battlenet Implant.”

“Certainly, Lieutenant.”

I sighed. “Not you, too. Just call me Seth, okay?”

I gathered up the rest of the squad, and handed out orders. I had Harris and Gunther climb up to the roof of the security station and set up a snipers perch, while the rest of us gathered what we could of the scattered salvage about the two platforms. I also had Rego working on the station’s AI Core that, remarkably, we found intact. We were able to link it to a few surviving cameras about the hub and used them to monitor for any Ghantri patrols.

It wasn’t long before we found them. Three roving patrols - one along the mag rail tracks, one further out from a passage we had not yet cleared and one nearby. The nearby patrol had obviously detected us and was waiting for us to approach, hoping to ambush us. Luckily, all but one of the patrols were two Ghantri teams, the third had four, plus a trio of Jaani.

I had Rego feed the locations of the patrols into all of our Tactical Apps as augmented reality, and we made short work of them one at a time.

Once Triptych and Rego confirmed that we had highjacked the Ghantri comms node and that the signal jumper was operational once more, I let everyone rest for a short while. We ate, we drank and we stripped down Rhondel’s gear for redistribution. We could always use more gear.

Dr Elias came through with a design for a mag rail car we could piece together from the salvage, and Tac got my Paradigm to link up to the battlenet for Ormund to send information to. My first use of the link was to create a three dimensional image of the design for the squad.

I was surprised to find that Geko was actually a rather decent mechanic and, along with Renthal and Masters, managed to cobble together a chassis that was sturdy and would withstand the high speeds that the mag rail would propel us to.

The electrics were another matter, and took us nearly six hours to assemble a workable simile of what Elias had designed. The problem was that we couldn’t test it properly, since we had no control over the mag rail itself. By the time we had it ready, there were more than a few nervous glances between us. If we’d put it together wrong, it would either fly apart in all different directions, do absolutely nothing, or throw us forward so fast that it would break all the bones in our bodies.

“All aboard!” called Geko, grinning from ear to ear. He was probably the only one of us not smart enough to know the consequences of messing up.