2 September, 2115:
MAI registers the breach at 02:35, less than twelve hours since the call from “Council Blue.”
There wouldn’t have been an alarm at all if we hadn’t recalibrated MAI’s security net to scan for our own SOF lock breakers—something I’ll have to thank Council Blue for. And we keep that alarm silent, letting our visitors proceed with their break-in, not letting them know they’re being watched.
We also left one of the airlocks—Airlock One, closest to high value targets as well as the perimeter wall—conveniently unguarded, so they meet no opposition when they pop the hatches. They do this with impressive skill and technique (breaking into a pressurized facility undetected is no easy task, even with the new denser atmosphere):
They use the breakers to disable the pressure sensors, then seal themselves to the outer hatch with a portable shelter. They manually bleed out the airlock, pop the hatch, slip inside and seal the outer door behind them. They disable the pumps (which certainly would be detected), then they repeat the bleed-and-pop process on the inner hatch. This process allows them to slowly equalize pressure as they pass into larger and larger spaces, so the decompression is minimal by the time they get through Staging and into the corridors (which we’ve also kept cleared).
“They’re good,” Lisa confirms. “They’re even monitoring our common Link bands to see if we’re talking about them.”
They move quickly but silently: checking each hatch and corner with wand-cameras before advancing, using the breakers to hack in and disable the motion-sensitive lights and sentry arrays as they go (the hack sets the internal video feed on a loop of empty corridor). Thankfully, they don’t notice MAI’s override, which simulates a successful hack while keeping the arrays functional.
The intruders match the ETE’s visitors in appearance: four lean bodies, shrouded masks, up-armored colony gear, PDWs (fitted with suppressors I’m sure they would use on anyone they incidentally encountered) and those unique short swords. They cling to the walls as they advance smoothly, with an unnatural grace; their footfalls making almost no sound at all, even with amplification.
And they show us they know exactly where to go, where to look for our ETE guests or anything we might have “sampled” from them: Two of the four head straight for A-Deck Medical, to Isolation, while the other two drop down to the Tech labs on B-Deck. (More telling is where they don’t go: to VIP quarters, so they assume we’re treating the Stilsons like subjects for study rather than guests.)
“I’m impressed,” Matthew says over my shoulder as we watch them on the Ops monitors. “I was beginning to think this wasn’t worth staying up for.”
“You sure we don’t want to alert the Stilsons?” Anton asks me again.
“If they’re here for what I think they are,” I tell him, “then we need to keep our new guests away from our old guests, and vice-versa.”
The first two gain access to Medical. Further proving their foreknowledge of our facilities, they immediately split: one searching the empty Iso rooms while the other goes for the Med Labs. One deck below, the other two have broken into the nearest Tech Lab and begin sweeping everything systematically with what look like old corporate lab safety gear, designed to detect any trace nano-culture leaks.
“You were right,” Matthew gives me. “They assume we ‘sampled’ one of the Brothers Blue.”
“They don’t know the nanites do break down as soon as they’re out of the body,” Rick adds, shaking his head.
“You checked?” Anton confronts him, sounding almost less offended by the breach of trust than by not being told.
“Paul let Doc Halley take blood. His nanites were completely degraded before they could be scanned.”
“But they don’t know that,” Anton worries.
“Which is why we keep them away from the Stilsons,” I tell him.
Our guests start looking frustrated. One of them tries to tap into MAI through a Lab terminal, tries to access the sentry system.
“He’s trying to get a fix on the Stilsons,” Matthew confirms.
“You’d think they’d be getting suspicious that they haven’t run into anybody yet,” Lisa wonders.
“Show’s over,” I decide, flashing a go-code into the Link. MAI slams the hatches closed around our guests, and 2nd and 3rd Platoons’ H-A suits move into the corridors surrounding those sections.
The intruders hesitate for less than a second. They each slap shaped charges on the nearest exits, then duck and cover as the heavy hatches blow outward. The H-A teams barely have enough warning to duck. I realize the blasts have bought our intruders time and space to move.
MAI gets the lights back on, but the corridors are full of smoke, more than a breaching charge alone would generate. MAI cranks the ventilators to try to clear it.
Sprays of full-auto fire come through the blown hatches on both decks. The troopers track their ICW’s and return fire in sparse bursts, MAI’s targeting trying to minimize damage to our facilities. On the screens, the motion sensors—partially futzed by whatever’s in the smoke—aren’t matching the intruders up to the firing trajectories. MAI registers breakers being used to hack in and kill the sensors on the Lab exhaust vents.
“They’ve set up some kind of remote decoy guns,” I bark into the Link. The troopers respond by launching shock grenades into the occupied lab (something they don’t dare do inside Medical because of the delicate and irreplaceable life-saving equipment).
“You can’t fit a man through an exhaust…” Rick is arguing, but MAI shows motion in the vents. Then the sensors fail.
“They’re probably climbing up to A-Deck so they can make a run for an airlock,” Matthew points to the blueprint.
“Or pop one of the old emergency access hatches to the roof,” Rick adds other possibilities.
“Rios, get guns on those vents where they hit A-Deck,” I order. The vents pass just behind the squads he has surrounding Medical, which puts his guns conveniently close, but it splits their attention in opposite directions. “Metzger?” I call over to Aircom.
“On, Colonel,” she comes back ready.
“Can you get me turrets pointed at those vent-caps topside?”
“Already done, sir. Free to fire?”
“On my order,” I hold.
“Labs are clear,” I hear Spec-4 Jenovec—one of the 3rd Platoon squad leaders—declare as they move in on B-Deck. “They dropped all their gear, went light—they won’t have breathers if they go topside.”
“Don’t touch their gear,” I order caution. “Back out. Hold position.”
“Booby-trap?” Matthew asks.
“I would, if I thought that far in advance,” I tell him. “And these guys seem to keep their moves planned out well ahead of the game.”
Proving the theory, MAI registers a small blast in the Tech Lab. Two of the troopers—Price and Scher—light up with shrapnel and concussive wounds.
“Halley! Armor down on B-Deck!” Matthew barks into the Link. “You’ll have to stabilize on-site—Medical isn’t cleared yet.”
“When you catch ‘em they’re gonna regret damaging the only hospital in over forty million miles,” I hear Halley, somewhere between irritated and angry.
MAI registers two more blasts, much smaller than the original breaching charges but just as smoky, blowing the access panels off the Lab vents on A-Deck. Rios has his troopers ready…
…and then nothing happens but the billowing smoke. Motions sensors start to blur out.
I watch helmet feed as a pair of troopers gets sent forward through the fog to carefully check the smoking vents. The sighting lasers of their ICWs lance brightly through the haze—I realize these lines would make them easy targets, but disabling the sights takes away MAI’s targeting assist (last thing I want is us shooting each other in the confusion).
“Some kind of Grappler in the vent shafts,” Sergeant Hendricks reports, aiming his helmet cams into one of the smoky shafts. “Looks like they shot cables and power-tow
ed themselves up. Probably took a hell of a beating squeezing through.”
“Nothing on radar, motion or infra-red,” Rios confirms grimly, moving up. “They’re not in there.”
“No activity on the vent-caps topside,” Metzger adds.
“They went down,” Matthew hisses, then calls in reinforcements. “Lieutenant Labeau! I need your guns on C-Deck! Lieutenant Bodicker: D and E Decks!”
“Too many places to cover,” Lisa complains as two more platoons race to join the game.
“Especially if they already got out of the vents while we were busy pointing guns where they were blasting,” Matthew agrees, probably whipping himself for assuming the enemy would panic and try to run by the direct route. Kastl is running full-map motion scans on all decks, filtering the sudden rush of activity against our own ID tags.
“All personnel: Look for smoke,” I advise. But the lower decks look clear on the sentry cams. There are blind spots in our visuals, but motion sensors and tag readers are everywhere. Without the masking smoke, it should be easy enough to nail something moving that isn’t tagged, but MAI isn’t reading any anomalies.
“Bodicker to Ops: We’ve got open access panels on D and E decks,” we get confirmation with visuals of neatly popped panels. I instantly wonder if they left open panels as decoys and exited elsewhere, resealing those plates. But that would take time.
Fifteen tense seconds later, MAI flashes us an error message.
“Duplicate tags,” Anton confirms. “Somehow they managed to copy our RFID signatures.”
MAI flashes everyone the copied IDs: Specialists Tanaka and Caan.
“Get eyes on those duplicate tags,” Matthew starts to order the obvious.
“Caan is with me,” Thomas reports immediately.
“I’ve got Tanaka,” Sergeant Henderson comes through a few seconds later. MAI locks those tags, then lights up the imposters.
“B-Deck West!” Matthew directs. “They managed to climb back up two decks while we were chasing them too high and too low.”
“I’ve got guns on the stairwells on A-Deck,” Rios assures.
“Fifth Platoon coming in from below,” Labeau supports. “They’re not getting off Baker-Deck.”
“And they’re not getting out of West,” Thomas promises, her troopers on all corridor hatches.
“Seal the section, lock everything down,” I order, realizing I’ve just locked our visitors into rich territory: Four barracks (which means uniforms, survival gear and chaos because we’ve just shut off-shift Fourth Platoon in with them), NCO billets, junior officer and support quarters, and an armory locker. Off-shift census puts forty-eight bodies in that section. MAI reads fifty moving tags.
“Just lost lock on the imposter tags,” Kastl announces. “Now I’ve got doubles from Fourth Platoon.”
“They’re rotating signatures,” Anton confirms. “Blending in with personnel in that section. Within a few meters, the readers can’t tell them apart.”
“Making it hard to pick them out in a populated section,” Matthew appraises. “We’ll need to eyeball everyone. Thomas: Coordinate with Lieutenant Lee and start clearing the section. Carefully. Keep the corridors locked down and start emptying the main barracks one-by-one. Check all IDs on I-Scan. Assume they’ll be trying to pass, wearing our gear. And be ready for surprises.”
“Yes, sir.”
On the sentry cams, I see the off-shift troopers and personnel—already out of their racks and in-uniform as soon as our visitors showed up—get ordered into lines for evacuation. Their squad NCOs issue weapons, knowing their own troopers by sight. The three bigger barracks have exits that open directly out of the section. The smaller barracks and the shared quarters all open onto the sealed corridors—that leaves eight of our people—including Lee, the Platoon CO—having to sit put, locked in until the corridors can be cleared, which means a room-by-room search by Thomas’ armored teams. But as soon as the first barracks’ hatch opens, smoke starts filling the surrounding corridors.
“Rios, what’s happening in Medical?” I see helmets advancing into a dark and hazy facility. There’s small-arms damage, mostly contained to the entry and the Iso clean-room (Halley will not be pleased). I also see how our visitors mounted their PDWs to the deck to fire back at us remotely while they went… Where?
The troopers work from west-to-east: they check the corners and potential hiding places in the main ward, the nursing and physician’s stations, the shift-doctor’s small quarters, then start clearing the exam and Iso rooms one-by-one. At the far east end, the hatch to the Pharmacy is open, and beyond that: Medical Stores.
“Don’t trust an open door,” I hear Rios warn his point team. One of the troopers improvises and rolls a chair through the Pharmacy hatch. A frag grenade peppers it almost instantly. They clear the small Pharmacy and repeat the trick with the Med Stores hatch, but nothing happens. Four armored troopers leapfrog inside and clear the packed space. It looks undisturbed.
“Distraction,” Matthew calls it.
“Main elevator’s been hacked,” Rios assesses. MAI releases the doors. The shaft is clear, but the sensors are offline.
“They went down?” Matthew moans.
“While we’re busy chasing the other half of their team up,” I agree.
“Feels like a goddamn game of Pac Man,” Matthew grouses. “Anybody remember Pac Man?” He doesn’t get an answer.
“Thomas: Send two of your squads to clear Medical B,” I have to order her to divide her forces. Thankfully we have no patients recovering in that ward, so we cleared it for the night just like A-Deck. “They may be heading for the larger Med Labs off the main ward,” I direct, though I expect this is more misdirection: that they’ve gone deeper to get lost before trying to make for the surface again. The sections below Medical are Hiber-Sleep. But Medical sits next to our air and water processors if they wanted to do us damage. Or they could make a run for our aircraft hangars. Or the civilian sections.
“We thought too narrow,” I mutter my stupidity out loud. “We should have had guns on every section.”
“They would have seen that,” Matthew supports. “And too hard to maintain. We didn’t know when—or if—they were coming.”
“If they wanted to really hurt us, they would have gone for Atmosphere and Water, or just blown up our Medical Stores while they were there,” Lisa tries.
“They may try to hurt us to get themselves a way out,” I decide. Then call “Tru?”
“Watching the show, Colonel,” she comes on, covering nervous with her usual cheer. “Anything we can do?”
“Our guest might try for a soft target to lever an exit,” I warn her. “Have your people ready.”
“Already are,” she assures, panning the camera across their housing bay to show me what looks like a mob ready for a brawl: knives and tools and even rivet-drivers and cutting torches for makeshift weapons.
On B-Deck, Thomas is making slow progress with the barracks evacuation. The West corridors are full of smoke, killing our sensors.
“Thomas to Ops, possible problem: Sergeant Martinez reports Sergeant First Class Schrader tried to get to Lieutenant Lee’s quarters. Took Specialist Wei with him. They haven’t come back.”
“They’re not reading,” Kastl checks. “Lost in that smoke.”
“Shit…” Matthew grumbles.
“Barracks B-One is clear and locked down,” Thomas focuses on progress. “Starting B-Two.”
“We’ve got sentries out and smoke in Medical B,” Sergeant Jones reports.
“Same on C-Deck,” Sergeant Riker adds to it.
“We’ve got the Med elevators locked down on D and E,” Lieutenant Bodicker assures. “Doesn’t look like they made it down this far. We’ll keep that gate shut.”
“Still, we’re chasing them in two directions on four separate decks,” Matthew considers sourly. “All without any sign they’re communicating with each other. Either they rehearsed the hell out of this or they’ve had lo
ts of practice. Hard not to appreciate these fuckers.”
“Tell that to Price and Scher,” Halley comes on. “I’ve got them stabilized, but they’ll be down healing some nasty penetration wounds for the next few weeks. The bastards load their explosives with some kind of flechettes that can cut through the soft joint-gaps in our suits.”
“How’s your hospital?” I ask her.
“Still not cleared, so I’m using one of the labs they didn’t wreck. But I’ve seen the mess on feed: I’m just glad we had the warning to clear out the essential gear before we got hit.”
“Barracks B-Two is clear and locked down,” Thomas updates us. “Still no sign of Schrader or Wei. Had to stop Martinez from going after them.”
“They have to know they can’t get past us,” Rios considers.
“Which means they’ll need to distract us or lever us,” I calculate.
“Colonel Ram, this is Tru. I’m going to move my people in to protect Atmosphere and Water. You’re spread thin and this is all the home we’ve got.”
“Labeau, Bodicker: crack the East Section arsenals and issue our volunteers small arms and Field Links,” I order. Matthew raises an eyebrow at me, but doesn’t seem in the mood to argue.
“Tru, tell your people to watch for any attempts to cut through from Medical,” I give her. “And watch the ductwork—they can get through some impressively tight spaces.”
“We’re on it, Colonel. And thank you.”
“You were planning on informing us of this?” I hear a familiar voice buzz through the Ops walls. The heavy floor hatch shimmers and two blue ETE suits come rising through it like ghosts out of a grave.
“We were trying to keep you both out of the line of fire,” I explain evenly, ignoring the breach. “Similar individuals attempted to force entry into your Station.”
“We know,” Paul says it before Simon can. “The Council contacted us.”
“Then you know what they appear to be after.”
“They have no hope of getting away with anything of value,” Simon insists.
“These guys are pretty impressive,” Matthew tells him. “I wouldn’t be assuming if I were you.”
“This is an ETE matter, Colonel,” Simon continues, ignoring Matthew’s warning.
“You should let us go in,” Paul softens it. “None of your people need be harmed on our account. Please.”
“Barracks B-Three is clear,” Thomas reports, sounding tense. “We can’t access Barracks Four without moving into the sealed corridors. Schrader and Wei still haven’t checked in.”
There’s a commotion on the Link. C-Deck Medical. Very little can be seen on-screen with all the smoke, but one of the feeds gets dragged back out into the less-hazy corridors, face-up at the ceiling.
“Medical!” It’s Sergeant Riker. “I have a man down! Some kind of throwing blade stuck between the shoulder and chest plates.”
We get feed of the injured trooper as his fellows try to pack and stabilize where a black metal flat spike protrudes between the laminate sections at the shoulder joint. MAI still has no targets on motion sensors.
“Colonel, please,” Paul repeats.
“With us backing you,” I insist. Paul nods his agreement. Simon doesn’t say a word.
We watch on video as the smoke is suddenly cleared from both B and C Medical as if by some strong wind. This reveals two of our intruders: they’re in C-Deck Iso, trying to make themselves an exit using ultrasonic tools to pop the welds on the bulkhead into Atmosphere (whether for mayhem or just a handy escape will remain up for debate, thanks to their timely interruption).
“Looking for me?” Simon’s voice comes out of the wall they’re breaking into, just before the metal shimmers and his helmeted sealsuit comes head-and-shoulders through it. Before the intruders can drop their tools and reach for their weapons, Simon grabs one of them by the left wrist and pulls, dragging him into the wall. On the monitors, I can hear the man cry out under his facemask: Simon has trapped the man’s hand in the bulkhead. Then Simon slides the rest of the way through into the room, pulling one of his Rods from his belt.
Before anything else can happen, I see the trapped man do the unthinkable: Without hesitating, his free hand draws his short sword from his back, and with one merciless stroke severs his own arm just above the wrist. He falls back away from the wall, spraying it with his blood as Simon freezes. Then his red-camo uniform does something just as unexpected: some kind of cable system in his sleeve spins down tight on the amputation, and there’s a bright flash across the stump that leaves the open wound charred and smoking.
“Fucker’s suit is rigged to expect dismemberment,” Matthew appraises in incredulous awe. “Son of a…”
I hear Simon gasp—the man he’s just had a part in maiming has gone on the offensive, driving his blade into Simon’s chest. Simon staggers as the weapon spears through him, then he thrusts his Rod into the solar plexus of his one-handed attacker, grunts something I can’t hear, and the other man flies back like a rag doll hit by a baseball bat. His body slams the opposite bulkhead as his compatriot dives out of the way, and I can hear bones breaking.
The other man is already firing, armed with a fast-cycle pistol as Riker’s HA suits blow in the hatches (something else for Halley to be upset about) and take the room. Simon—sitting on the floor clutching his chest wound with one hand—now has one of his Sphere’s in hand, projecting a shield to block the worst of it. But without pausing, the second man tosses a handful small objects at them that quickly prove to be grenades. I hear at least one of Rikers’ squad curse as nano-shrapnel finds gaps between the plates in their armor. The enemy uses the chaos of the blasts to try to charge straight through the armor line, discarding his apparently empty pistol and going for his own sword.
He’s fast: I watch him leap and weave, hacking at HA plate, which his blade actually seems to partially penetrate, and at least one ICW gets cut almost through trying to block the powerful chopping attacks. Riker’s troopers lose patience, and I watch ICW fire tear into the masked swordsman. Still, he tries to keep coming. A final ICW blast puts him down, spraying him all over the bulkheads—it’s Riker herself who puts an end to it.
The other man isn’t moving, a heap on the deck.
“Pull back just in case the fucker is wired to blow,” Matthew orders, recalling what they set for us in the Labs. “Make sure the other one isn’t going anywhere. Get your wounded to Medical.”
Paul comes down through the ceiling from where he’d cleared B-Deck and immediately sets his tools to making things easier for us: He dissolves everything the two intruders are wearing. But that reveals ragged bloody gunshot trauma on the one body and clearly broken limbs (and one severed and burned) on the other. I can’t see his reaction with his mask down, but he freezes for a few seconds before seeing to his brother.
Simon puts away his own tools and sits back against the wall, looking like he’s having a hard time breathing. I have MAI zoom close on his chest wound and watch his nanites resealing his torn suit.
“That was unpleasant…” I finally hear him groan.
The sword that pierced his chest is on the deck at his feet. I can see his blood rapidly dry on the blade and turn to dust.
“Two down,” I hear Matthew observe coolly.
“Two to go,” I answer him.
“Sit-Rep?” I ask Lieutenant Thomas for an update. On my screens, I see squads of armor on each hatch into B-West.
“No change. Still quiet,” she answers from behind her gun. I still have eight personnel locked down in that section, though apparently safe, and the two—Schrader and Wei—still unaccounted for. On the feed, I see Paul and Simon come up behind her troopers. Simon looks like he’s still moving with some difficulty. They divide and each take one of the main access hatches, drawing their tools, then nodding their helmets to let us know they’re ready.
“Open it,” I order. Thomas and her Platoon SFC Masters each take a hatch and cycle the manual locks, s
hove them open and get ready to fire. Paul and Simon use their Spheres to clear the smoke, pushing it down the corridors, which form a large U-shape. (The three large Barracks are inside the U; the smaller Barracks, quarters, Heads and armory locker are on the outside, butted up against the solid bunker wall. There’s no way out except through the corridor hatches or big Barracks—even any wall they could cut through would drop them into the midst of our guns. The plumbing trunks in the two Heads are even narrower than the lab vents, but we have guns on them above and below just in case.)
MAI locks onto Schrader’s and Wei’s tags just as Thomas gets eyes on a body at the far bend of the south corridor. It’s Sergeant Schrader, face-down in a pool of blood.
Wei reads as inside the southwest Head. The sentry cameras are offline, and MAI reads no motion (which means they know to stand still) and no heat but Wei’s (which means they’re still masked from our sensors).
The remaining two may or may not have monitored the fate of their fellows, but if they were expecting another diversion, when it doesn’t come they’ll know they can’t get through us, at least not without our allowing it, and that means they need leverage.
I patch into MAI’s PA feed.
“This is Colonel Ram, commanding officer of this installation. I would like to resolve this without further violence.”
There is no reply for several moments. I repeat my offer. Again, I get silence.
“Stubborn? Or just antisocial?” Matthew wonders.
“So far our new friends have been exclusively Japanese,” I remind him, now that we’ve confirmed the ethnicity of the two down in Medical-C.
“Shinkyo?” Matthew considers. “Our invisible colony?”
“Old-School Japanese corporate. And this reminds me of an old negotiating trick—military strategy applied to business: You let the opposition put their offer out, and then just sit quietly like they didn’t say anything. The other guy gets nervous and keeps talking, puts all his cards on the table while you reveal nothing. May even start sweetening the deal just to get a response.”
“So what’s the counter-play?”
“The one who speaks first has already given up something,” I tell him. “Let them know the offer isn’t a given, that it’s time limited, and you’ve got options. Leave them something sweet, and politely withdraw.”
“Draw them out?”
I nod, and go back to the PA:
“Given your demonstrated efficiency in killing, I have no reason to believe you have a live hostage. You have no exit. I can simply seal that section and sterilize it with incendiaries.”
After a few seconds, the sentry cameras in the Head come back up, showing us Wei in the small shower, bound hand and foot and gagged, but still visibly breathing. Our invaders cannot be seen. The cameras go dark again almost immediately.
“Proof of life?” Matthew assesses.
There is a muffled cry of pain, and a few seconds later something very small is tossed out through the Head hatchway and into the corridor. MAI zooms in to show us a bloody, severed fingertip.
“Listen to me!” I suddenly hear Paul’s voice shouting over the PA. “You cannot achieve your objective! Our nanites are programmed to break down immediately upon losing contact with their living host. They cannot be extracted, no matter how advanced your containment technology is!”
“Looks like the other guy got nervous,” Matthew grumbles.
“You will have to take one of us with you,” Paul continues. “I will exchange myself for your prisoner, and ensure you a safe exit to the surface. No one else need get hurt.”
There’s no reply, but at least there’s no further bloodshed.
At the far end of the corridor I see Paul push his way through the H-A’s covering the section hatch. He stops just inside the corridor, folds away his helmet and waits. I see him glance up at the sentry camera and give the slightest smile. Then he unbuckles his “tool belt” and passes it back to Lieutenant Thomas. He raises his hands and does a slow turn to show that he is indeed disarmed, and starts walking slowly down the corridor toward the Head.
I see him pause over Schrader’s body for a few tense seconds before proceeding, then stops at the hatchway, making eye contact with someone inside. Then he looks back in Thomas’ direction.
“Clear the corridor, please! I will go with them of my own accord—no one else will be harmed because of me. Your soldier is still alive, but needs medical attention. The intruders have already acquired fresh breather gear—it looks like we are ready to be going. Please do not interfere.”
I give Thomas the order to withdraw, clearing the corridors all the way back to the nearest stairwell, and tell Rios to open a path on A-Deck back out to Airlock One.
“All the way out,” I clarify. “I don’t want them seeing anymore guns. Thomas: once they’re clear, send a team in to secure Specialist Wei and Sergeant Schrader, but be alert for more booby-traps.”
When Paul steps back out into the corridor again, he’s got what looks like a bomb strapped to his chest. The two masked invaders take up positions close to him on either side, pulling his arms up tight behind him. They start walking him when it looks like they’ve got a clear path.
“This is working out well,” Matthew grouses.
No longer bothering to disable cameras, I watch them walk smoothly and confidently all the way out to the airlock. They step in, set their masks (and I see Paul’s helmet fold itself back down over his face), seal the hatch behind them and cycle pressure to let themselves out into the frozen night.
“Colonel,” Thomas has come up to Ops, probably at a run. “You need to see this…” She hands me Paul’s belt. The three Rods and three Spheres are in their holders, but then she points to one of the Spheres: the metal is oddly dull, lacking the quicksilver quality of the others.
I watch on the surface cameras as Paul is rushed out beyond the perimeter and out over the rocky terrain. But then Paul suddenly doubles over, staggering. His two captors turn on him swiftly, drawing their swords, one brandishing a small detonator switch to threaten him. But his hands grip his abdomen. I can hear him scream over the Link. The two invaders realize their danger too late. I watch the bomb around his neck crumble like so much dry sand, then their blades turn to dust before they can strike.
Paul straightens with difficulty. In his hands is a Sphere, its liquid-metal surface visibly stained with blood—he must have manufactured a fake to fill the gap on his belt, then somehow inserted the real one into his own body where it would not be detected. Before the two invaders can get to their pistols, I see a familiar wind strike them, disintegrating their guns and stripping both of them to their boots. Their masks, too, are gone. Still, they have enough wind left to run off naked into the Martian night. If they don’t have shelter or transport close, they will freeze or suffocate within minutes.
Paul looks after them as they go, but it doesn’t look like he’s got the strength just now to try to pursue them. He falls to his knees.
“Go get him!” I order Thomas. “Get some lights out on the surface.”
But Simon is already out there, the tools in his hands generating lift to skim him quickly over the surface.
“You want us to pursue?” Rios asks.
“No,” I tell him. “Wait ‘til daylight. If they don’t come crawling back before then, send out an H-A squad. I don’t want any more surprises tonight.”
When the sunrise comes, we can find no sign of their bodies. Not even tracks. Or signs of a ship. The ASVs circled out twenty miles.
“They either dug in, or had a vehicle somewhere, something masked from our radar,” Lisa considers as we watch the last sweeps from Ops, the Martian sky turning from violet to dusty pink above the ridge-lines.
“If they were from Shinkyo, that colony had cutting-edge vehicles,” Rick remembers. “And a close look at those uniforms of theirs showed multiply-redundant backups: the base sealsuit was pressure, temperature and radiation protective, and it was lined w
ith small spare O2 canisters.”
“Anybody who thinks that far ahead in terms of options would have left backup gear outside,” Matthew assesses.
“And hidden a vehicle somewhere,” Lisa repeats. “If they have stealth aircraft, they’ve got an edge on us.”
“I’m still impressed with the whole instant-amputation feature,” Matthew muses. “That was just over-the-top.”
“Michael?” Lisa catches me staring blankly out at the horizon.
“I shouldn’t have let them in.”
“You couldn’t have anticipated…” she tries.
“The plan was to take them alive,” Matthew reminds me needlessly. “The intel was worth the risk. We just got a different kind of intel.”
“We got samples of their gear and weapons,” Rick allows. “It’s all been carefully stripped of anything that would ID them, but the tech that made it looks similar enough to the nano-materials that Shinkyo was producing.”
“None of us expected them to be as hardcore as they were,” Matthew keeps trying to console.
“We’ve had a taste of what people on this world have become,” I shoot him down.
“So do we drop the outreach?” he challenges. “Treat them all as enemy combatants?”
“We need to be careful,” I temper it. “We need to be ready.”
“Which means we need all the intel we can get.”
“I doubt we got what we paid for,” I mutter to the plexi.
Schrader bled out fast from a sword cut that split his left collarbone; another funeral I have to preside over.
Six of my troopers have penetration wounds from the nano-shrapnel that found ways through their armor, and three more suffered blade cuts through their armor—Rick took a close look at the swords and throwing knife they used and determined that they’re nano-manufactured ceramic composite; extremely sharp, hard and resilient, capable of cleaving even nano-carbon laminate plate given enough force in the swing. The Shinkyo Corporation wasn’t working on anything like that above-board before the bombardment, but the design of the blades is distinctly Japanese.
The one Simon slammed with his Rod survived his wounds, but only just: He remains in a coma with a severe skull fracture, and Halley doubts if he’ll recover. She also reports he received several fractures, including broken ribs that punctured to both lungs and his liver—she spent more time trying to patch him than she did with all of our other combined wounded.
At least Paul and Simon seem no worse for what they took. Both looked recovered by late morning, though Simon has been keeping to himself, avoiding us under the excuse of helping search for the two that ran. Getting a sword run through his chest probably made him hit back harder than he’d intended.
Paul reluctantly admitted that the blade found Simon’s heart (and then explained with unusual candor how their nanites will create a backup circulatory system independent of the heart until it can be repaired and restarted, just like when he got shot). Then Paul upstaged Simon’s trauma by relating his own brilliant plan (impulsively decided upon between taking out the intruders in Medical and realizing the last two would probably use hostages to get out) to use a Rod as a makeshift surgical tool to cut open his own abdomen (when Simon refused to do it) and hide a Sphere in his bowels.
Their ordeals, however, seem to have brought the brothers somewhat closer together (and prompted Matthew to start displaying greater respect for the “Blues Brothers”).
“Next move?” Matthew asks me.
“Harden base security, especially given what we’ve just seen. Get more sensors out on the surrounding terrain, and make sure MAI can detect any potential hacks—I’m betting they got more intel out of us than we did out of them. We need to rebalance that.” Then I turn to Matthew and Lisa. “Since our prisoner is in no condition to talk, we need to go have a talk with the ones that are.”
Chapter 4: Lessons in Human Nature