Veil of Shadows (Book 2 of The Empire of Bones Saga) (16 page)

Reese turned his head and looked at her as though he could sense her uneasiness. He probably could. “You okay, Princess?”

“I’m a little nervous,” she admitted. “I know I’m probably overthinking this, but I can see so many ways this could go bad.”

“You’re not alone. The trick is deciding which possibilities are reasonable. We’re going in with overwhelming force, but we have no reason to believe that the Pale Ones have packed this thing with their people. Or that they’ve booby-trapped it.

“Look at their space station, for example. The damned thing was huge and had plenty of Pale Ones on board, but they didn’t effectively counterattack until we were on the way back out. You probably don’t remember it very clearly, but they were not prepared for an incursion. My advice? Don’t borrow trouble.”

Kelsey nodded. “That’s true, but look what happened when we came into the system this time. They had ships lying in wait for us. They expected us. Or something controlling them expected us. What if they took the same kind of precautions on the asteroid?”

“Then we deal with it. If it’s too tough, we withdraw. This isn’t a suicide mission.”

Talbot bumped her shoulder from the other side. “Besides, you got me and the boys keeping an eye on you. As if you need it. You’re a major badass in that suit.”

She’d certainly loaded it down as though she’d expected she was going into combat. Her pistols were on her hips, including plenty of extra ammunition. She also had a flechette rifle built for the armor resting between her knees. She’d strapped a similarly large plasma rifle across her back. Extra ammunition and power packs for those were also on her belt. A couple of old Empire grenades and an insanely sharp knife rounded out her weapons load.

She felt ridiculous.

Talbot had insisted she bring everything along. Just in case, he’d said. She might never need it, but if she did, it wouldn’t help her if it were back on the ship.

Kelsey was certain that they wouldn’t be letting her use any of her hardware. If they got into a situation where they were exchanging fire, Talbot would pull her back. She knew he had orders to keep her out of trouble. All this gear was to distract her.

But having it along provided some distinct pluses. Her armor’s scanners had significant advantages over what the marines around her carried. She also had a few little toys that she hadn’t discussed with Senior Sergeant Talbot in her pouches. If she was playing at being a marine, she should come ready to dance.

The pilot opened a link to Lieutenant Reese. “We’re not taking any fire, Lieutenant, so we’re going in. ETA five minutes.”

Kelsey wasn’t supposed to be able to overhear that remark, but her armor had informed her that there were encrypted communications on the pinnace earlier and she’d asked for more information about the transmission.

Apparently, the combat computer in the armor had decided she’d asked for it to tap into the communication channels. It took less than five minutes for the armor to crack the encryption. She’d tell Lieutenant Reese about that after they returned to
Courageous
. She was certain he’d want to do something about that, though she had no idea what that would be.

“Everyone, we’re going in,” Lieutenant Reese said. “Final equipment check.”

She sent a status query to her armor and it came back green on all systems. “My armor indicates it’s ready. That’s going to have to be good enough for us.”

“Fine, but I’ll check just to be sure.” Talbot had someone read the checklist that she’d pulled from the armor to him as he looked at everything.

Patching her suit into the pinnace’s scanners was more complex than tapping into the encrypted communication link, but she’d figured it out just before they landed. The images and readings were somewhat crude based on her experiences tapping into
Courageous’
scanner suite, but they told her what was going on well enough.

They were landing at the Pale Ones facility. Of course, from what she could see facility might be too grand a word. The scanners showed a crude, low dome with standard old Empire docking clamps. It didn’t look too well put together to her. In fact, it seemed like a deranged child had built it.

Lieutenant Reese’s plan was to dock as quickly as possible. If something went wrong, the marines would retreat and attack from the surface, blowing a convenient entrance through the exterior hull.

And probably dragging her along like a cat in a bag as they rushed in. She still hadn’t gotten any zero G training. Perhaps her implants could help her out with that, too.

A tense few minutes went by as the pinnace docked and the marines breached the facility. They reported that they were inside with no resistance, so Lieutenant Reese ordered his remaining men in. The facility had gravity.

When he nodded to Kelsey, she went through the boarding hatch with Talbot and his squad close around her. She held the flechette rifle to her chest with the muzzle angled down towards the floor as Talbot had trained her to do. The remainder of the marines came in behind her.

The corridor upheld the Pale Ones’ low building standards. The facility was small enough that the marines had most of the floor occupied. The reports flowed back that they hadn’t discovered any Pale Ones. They had discovered a lift, however. It seemed this facility had more than one floor.

Lieutenant Junior Grade Ralph Phelps, the engineer assigned to the mission, frowned. “There’s no reason to have an underground facility. All they need is a scanner package and a control computer. That could fit into this building easily.”

“Welcome to combat, Lieutenant,” Reese said. “The enemy is never obliging enough to do exactly what you’d expect. We’ll have to go down and see for ourselves what they’ve left for us.”

The young cutter pilot, Ensign Danielle Cruz, nodded. The two non-combatants were in borrowed armor, but unarmed. They’d be behind Kelsey, keeping out of any fracas. Unless things went to hell.

They would’ve taken the stairs, except there weren’t any. The only way down was the lift. So rather than obliging the enemy by going down in small groups, Lieutenant Reese ordered them to cut the bottom out of the lift. It made quite a clattering noise as it fell to the bottom of the shaft. If the enemy didn’t know they were there before, they did now.

The marines nimbly went down on ropes. The shaft only went down one level, so the drop was very short. Kelsey looked down, picked a spot without debris, and jumped. Her heart was in her throat for a moment, but her suit absorbed the landing easily.

“Don’t do that to me, Princess,” Talbot said over their private channel. “You’re going to give me a heart attack.”

“Don’t get your panties in a knot,” she muttered before she activated her microphone. “I don’t know how to use those ropes, but I’ve done enough with the suit to know what I can do. That was a breeze.”

“Yeah, maybe so. But give a guy a little warning, will you?”

The marines had already forced the lift doors open, so she followed them out. This level was just as shoddy as the one above. The floors weren’t exactly level and there was no paint anywhere. Just enough bare functionality to get by.

Kelsey scanned the area around them. Most of the information didn’t mean anything to her, but the suit reported a large area directly in front of the lift as shielded. She couldn’t detect anything but a blank spot in her readings.

“Lieutenant Reese, there’s something ahead of us. I’m sensing a very large shielded area about seventy-five meters ahead.”

“I don’t see anything. Are you certain?”

“I’m positive.”

Reese ordered his men to move forward. He gestured for Talbot to stay back with her.

She wasn’t the least bit offended. She’d been in one firefight and wasn’t eager to repeat the experience. She nervously eyed her readouts as they moved into the shielded area. Nothing looked different about the corridor around them, but now her scanners couldn’t detect anything. Not even the bulkhead right next to her.

One of the marines up front reported an armored hatch. Reese ordered a halt while they planted charges to breach it.

“Maybe I can open it,” she said. “Let me take a look.”

Reese reluctantly agreed. She made her way through the marines until she stood in front of the hatch.

“If you open it, just step aside, and let us go in first,” Talbot said.

Kelsey nodded and felt for an interface with the door. She found one, but it was different from any that she’d accessed before. It felt…stupid. It didn’t respond to a query for information, and only seemed to have the option of open or closed. Perhaps that was all the Pale Ones were capable of telling the hatch to do.

She sent at a command to open and the hatch slid to the side. The room beyond was dark, but she didn’t need to see to know what was there. The scanner shielding didn’t obscure the inside of the compartment. Dozens of threat icons popped up in her mind’s eye. Unbelievably, some of them registered as wielding advanced weaponry, and she instinctively knew that the Pale Ones were targeting the marines.

“Ambush!” Her automated reflexes didn’t care what Reese had ordered her to do. They threw her through the hatch and off to the side, out of the deathtrap the corridor was about to become in the face of old Empire weapons. She sent the mental command for the hatch to close even before she started moving. Reese and Talbot were going to be furious, but it beat them being dead.

The world was already slowing as she brought up her rifle and swept across the Pale Ones, the combat drugs taking effect. The light stroke of the trigger she gave the rifle sent a stream of hypervelocity flechettes into the unarmored savages. The darts shredded them, just like the simulated targets on the firing range. She kept moving under the assumption they’d focus their fire on her.

The shots they sent towards the marines in the hall struck the hatch as it slammed closed, blowing large divots in the metal. It wasn’t going to open very easily now. She staggered and fell when one of the flechettes struck her shoulder, but the armor held.

Kelsey knew that the Pale Ones could see in the dark just as well as she could, so she rolled behind a large piece of equipment. She had no idea what it was, but it was bulky enough to stand up to fire for a few seconds. She retrieved the scanner remote she’d put in her pouch and threw it out into the center of the compartment.

The manual she’d found for it said that she’d be able to use the remote to fire without exposing herself, but she was nowhere near that good yet. Instead, she noted where the largest concentration of the enemy was and threw a grenade. When it went off, it was as though the world had ended.

She’d never experienced such a tremendous shockwave of light, noise, and pressure. The commando suit protected her from most of it, but not all. The remote reported more than half of the ambushers as obliterated or down.

Kelsey popped up while they were stunned and opened fire. She killed several of them before diving behind fresh cover. Only half a dozen of them were still alive, scattered around the room. Being able to see them from relative safety, she was able to pick them off one by one until she was alone again. They managed to hit her two more times: once in the leg and once on the side of her helmet. That last shot stunned her, but her implants and pharmacology unit kept her on her feet.

She staggered to her feet and made a sweep of the compartment, verifying there were no more hostiles. There weren’t. The Pale Ones were dead.

Reese and Talbot had been trying to contact her continuously since the firefight started, but she hadn’t been able to answer them. Well, she didn’t have enough attention to spare for them. She supposed that a real marine could do both those things and more all at the same time.

“It’s okay,” she said. “They’re all down. Let me see if I can get this door open.” She sent it a command to the hatch to open. It not only failed to open, she couldn’t sense it anymore. “It’s not responding. It must’ve been damaged in the firefight.”

“Get back,” Reese snarled. “We’re going to blow the hatch. Like we should have in the first place.”

Oh, yeah. She was in big trouble.

The explosives they set off warped the hatch even further, but didn’t open it. Neither did the second set. That caused Lieutenant Reese to curse a lot more. Somehow, she didn’t think his failure was putting her in a better position when he got his hands on her.

“Go back to the lift,” she said. “I’m going to blow the hatch from inside.”

She retreated to the rear of the compartment, took cover, and brought the plasma rifle off her back. She trained it on the hatch, and when Reese reported he was clear, pulled the trigger. The resulting explosion blew the armored hatch into molten fragments. It did the same for the first ten meters of the corridor, leaving a gaping concave area of pure rock and melted metal in its wake.

Kelsey whistled. The armor-grade plasma rifle was significantly more powerful than the regular handheld version. Just like her flechette rifle was vastly more capable than its smaller brethren, managing to accelerate the tungsten alloy darts up to 5,000 meters a second. All it took was one glance around the room at the shredded bodies and divots blown into the walls to imagine how effective and terrifying full-scale combat would’ve been in the old Empire.

The marines had to wait for the corridor to cool before they came in, which caused Lieutenant Reese’s temper to fray further. When he ordered his men in, she stood there with her arms out so they wouldn’t mistake her for a threat.

Reese stormed over to her. “That was the most irresponsible, fool-headed stunt I’ve ever seen in my life. What the hell were you thinking?”

He held up his hand before she could respond. “On second thought, I don’t want to know. Whatever it was, it was wrong. I thought I was crystal clear that you were not to put yourself into danger. Did I stutter?”

“No, Lieutenant. But I didn’t have a choice. There were dozens of them with a clear line of fire straight down that corridor. Those flechettes would’ve blown your armor to pieces. I had to distract them and get that hatch closed before they killed all of us. Tell me you would’ve done something differently.”