Chapter 7
Cielo’s corridors were relatively narrow, and their smooth walls afforded no cover whatsoever, as Gabriel remembered from his arrival the day before. The only exceptions were the elevator bays. Around Cielo’s 4,750-foot circumference were eight elevators that led “up” into the central docking hub, and each of those took up half of the corridor’s twelve foot width. The vertical steel tubes offered a natural defilade every 600 feet or so along the sloping hall, and Gabriel knew the opposing force would use them for cover.
His neuretics pulled a schematic of the station from Cielo’s security system and projected it into his Mindesye, then plotted the position of the most recent threat. He pushed the image off to one side, not wanting a full HUD at this point, and sent out a more powerful passive scan.
The flashing icon was behind the closest elevator bay, as Gabriel himself would have been, and in the direction of the transmission origin. He quickly popped his head through the doorway. Without the steel walls and bulkheads in his line of sight, his neuretics were able to “see” into the corridor. His passive scan pinned down the likely transmission source as a small room about halfway around the torus, on the same side of the hallway as the lab. He had nearly 2,000 feet to go, past three elevator bays, and at least one hostile in his way, most likely more.
He pulled his head back into the lab, lowering the pulse rifle, and glanced down at the unconscious gunman slumped against the bulkhead. His modern plate-on-fabric combat armor appeared to be NAF-issued, but the weapon most certainly was not. The boots didn’t match the armor, the armor bore no insignia, rank, or name, and his unkempt hair stuck out from under the ill-fitting half helmet. The helmet was a combat-rated generic model used by dozens of third-world armies with rudimentary electronics and communications, no HUD visor or face shield, and no direct neuretics link. He was a walking contradiction, or in his case, a sleeping one. Who the hell are these guys?
He rechecked his data. It was 163 feet to the first elevator bay, and his first obstacle. He debated sending an active scan to fully plot his route, but again dismissed it as being too risky. Wait. The security system. He pulled up the station’s security program and went through the system packages visually in Mindseye, like flipping the pages of a book. He stopped at a folder marked AV and requested access. The sentry algorithm only gave token resistance before his neuretics breezed through.
He found the video monitoring systems for the corridor and began searching. Within seconds, an image seen from above of a man in combat armor crouching behind the gray steel elevator bay popped up. Gabriel flipped through more vids and found two more hostiles, both taking cover behind the elevator bay closest to the transmission origin. No other vids picked up anyone in the corridor; it was completely empty. Again he wondered about the identity of the attackers, as the security system showed no elevated threat levels anywhere on the station. Yet there they were, and the station seemed devoid of any other personnel. According to Cielo’s standard operating manifest, dozens of researchers should be on duty at any given hour, not to mention the regular comings and goings of Navy personnel. Something was seriously wrong with the entire situation, but Gabriel put that thought off for now. He had a more immediate threat — three armed hostiles in his way.
He was about to step into the corridor when a thought hit him. With three hostiles along the shortest route to his target, the longer route may be undefended, and it was a circle after all. He enlarged the station schematic, then frowned as he scanned the data.
According to the station plans, Cielo had four heavy carbotanium blast doors along its circumference that sealed off a quarter of the corridor in case of atmospheric breach or accidental release of materials from one of the research labs. The security schematic showed the one to Gabriel’s left, or in the direction of the long route around the station, was closed. He sent a signal to the system to check the door’s status, and it showed hard-locked, meaning manually dogged, apparently from the other side, according to the readout.
They were leading him.
The station was empty, only one route was available to him, and it led through armed gunmen. It was most certainly a trap, but why? Gabriel looked back at the locker on the far side of the lab, where the bloody shirt lay. If someone wanted him dead, the easiest way would have been to do it while he was under sedation, fast asleep in a pool of goo in a sealed container. Something else was going on here.
A memory nagged at him: the assault on the pirate hideout on the asteroid a few weeks back. He and his team had rooted out and captured or killed a dozen pirates by going door-to-door through the makeshift surface station the pirates had built using leftover or stolen prefab units tied down to the dusty asteroid with steel cables. And now here Gabriel was, about to embark on an eerily similar door-to-door mission with a singular target, only this time, he was alone.
His thoughts were interrupted by his threat assessment pinging him. The security system video feed image, still projected into a small corner of his Mindseye like a holovid picture-in-picture, showed the nearest gunman edging around the elevator bay, and the other two starting to move as well.
He took one last look at his boots under the table and sighed. Bringing the rifle back up to his shoulder, he turned and stepped into the corridor.
The limpet mine was unexpected.