Incursion at elea statio.., p.18
Incursion at Elea Station, page 18
She was right. I was painting Matt Matt with the same brush I'd used for Inder. I reversed the nanobots and crouched next to him.
"What happened?" he asked, rubbing his neck and looking around the hold.
"Crewman Inder activated your patch. It was his assertion that you had requested him to do so," I said.
To my surprise, Matt Matt nodded his head. "I did," he said.
"Are you in or out?" I asked. "I need your decision."
"You could have just sent me," he said. "I was unconscious."
"Make a decision, Matt Matt," I pushed.
"What happened to Inder?" he asked. "He was just doing what I asked."
"He requested to stay behind," I said. "Your decision?"
Matt Matt looked from Zaida and then back to me. "Do it," he said. "Knock me out."
I patted the big man on his chest. "Courage is doing what you know is right even when you are afraid. You've a big heart, my friend." I swiped at my HUD's display and sent him back under.
"What about me?" Tonifi's voice floated across the deck from the hatch. I hadn't even considered her in our upcoming action. The Musi were physically weak and on the lower end of intelligence. They weren't without value, however, as I'd seen firsthand.
"We're headed into combat, Tonifi," I said. She winced visibly at my words but continued forward.
"I will fight," she said, her tiny hand shaking as she drew a small pistol.
Her statement caught me off guard. I was attempting to board and take control of a mining platform with a team that had virtually no combat experience. Adding a Musi to the mix was even more ludicrous.
"I will make her my responsibility," Zaida said, "but only if she will take cover when we are in combat."
I closed my eyes, wondering how things had grown so far beyond my control. Only moments ago, I'd had a first-class team that had trained together for hours for just this level of challenge. Now, at the last minute, we were switching out players like pro pod-ball teams in the Mars Cup.
Tabby re-entered the hold and raised her eyebrows as she noticed Tonifi. Remembering that I'd asked her to remove Matt Matt, as well, she crossed to where he lay unconscious.
"No, he's going," I said, stopping her as I weighed the decision about Tonifi.
"I thought …" she said.
"I woke him. Turns out he's okay going if he's not awake for the ride," I said.
Tabby nodded. "Good. He'd regret it later. You're not actually thinking of bringing Tonifi, are you?"
I nodded. "She's in. Noah's in. We're doing this."
Tabby frowned at me like I was losing my mind but then shrugged. "Let's roll."
As Tabby climbed into her Popeye, I configured a patch for Tonifi. "Noah, you're in the third Popeye." Like everything else, it was a gamble. Noah had precious few hours in the mechanical infantry suit. If we needed to move fast, he'd be a liability. However, if we needed to deliver firepower, his suit's weaponry would be substantial. I was probably projecting, but I believed him up to the task.
"Prajna, we're getting ready to take off," I said. "We won't use comms once we're outside Intrepid. It's critical that you move out as soon as we're clear. If anyone from that station is watching, I need them to believe you're just interring your dead before departing."
"Roger, Hoffers."
After zipping up Matt Matt’s body bag and seeing Noah into his Popeye, I walked across the deck to my own. I welcomed the quiet as I climbed in and closed the suit. Our slow journey to the platform would take twelve hours. Even so, we'd be moving at such a rate we'd have to expose ourselves in the last moments as we bled off speed. In that time, if the station's inhabitants saw us or had the ability to target us, it would be our final trip. I recalled an orbital drop when a singular point-to-point comm had brought doom to a soldier only meters from my position.
"Noah, I've sent you a navigation path," I said. "Let your Popeye handle it. I've also given you a patch. Activate it and we'll wake you when its go-time."
"Copy." He jogged toward the end of the hold and jumped toward Elea, his arc jets firing as his AI made corrections.
Carefully, Tabby lifted Zaida from the deck. The brave Felio lay rigid in her bag, having already activated her patch.
I didn't want to be too far behind, so I picked up Matt Matt and pushed him out of the hold, then turned back and grabbed the small bag holding the Musi. With Tonifi in my arms I gently leapt from the hold, giving myself enough push so I would catch Matt Matt.
It took several minutes to position the two bags which held my crew. Under the direction of the AI, I first released Tonifi and then Matt Matt. We were spread out enough that we would arrive within seconds of one another, but not on top of each other.
I locked the joints of my Popeye and settled in for the long journey. Uneasiness fell over me as Intrepid arced away from Elea and Prajna lit her engines. I'd decided against taking a sedative to get me through the long journey and regretted the decision as time slowed to a near-infinite crawl.
For hours, the wide platform had been little more than a spec in the distance. Only in the last minutes of flight had it started to grow to its full size. At two kilometers out, we all needed to decelerate. That would be the moment of truth. If the platform was tracking us and had the capacity to fine tune the aim of their cannons, we would be picked off one by one, with little to say about it.
The gambit wasn’t as bad as it sounded. Our deceleration plan would take a total of ninety seconds and while that sounded like a long time, it would require an extremely watchful operator, not to mention precision shooting. Gunners were trained to strike ships more in the range of a hundred and twenty meters and forty-five hundred tonnes. Entirely different skills were required to hit a three meter, virtually signal-less object.
Zaida was the first to cross the boundary. I looked on as she extracted herself from the body bag and gave it a light shove away from her. The move was smart as it would provide a second target and more importantly, not interfere with her deceleration. As I expected from a Felio, she gracefully lined up with the deceleration plan and lit her arc-jets.
Using tactical, low-energy communications, my suit reached out to and made links with my team. Bio monitors showed healthy green lines for each of them. A moment later, Tabby's Popeye exited its static existence and her arc-jets fired. Only forty seconds had elapsed from Zaida’s first movement until all six of us were burning off our acceleration.
I had just started to think we would land unscathed when a bright light illuminated my suit. I twisted around, knowing the source had been somewhere behind me. Matt Matt's bio signal turned from bright green to gray. I'd lost his signal entirely. I searched the starfield for where I knew he should be and found nothing.
"Switch to hot landing," I ordered. It was a crazy maneuver. We would push our suits to their limits by holding our deceleration to the absolute minimum. The potential for sprains and even broken bones was very real, but it would be better than being vaporized.
I swiped at my display and stabbed at my shite-hit-the-fan protocol. A brilliant glow appeared ahead of us, moving significantly faster than we were. A second glow joined the first, moving at a slightly different rate but burning just as brightly.
"What the frak is that?" Noah asked.
"No comms," I growled.
Part of my emergency protocol included lighting up the body bags three of the crew had separated from before deceleration began. I'd installed flares inside the bags just in case we needed a distraction. The ruse was a good one as it kept attention focused along our original path. A line of death reached out from the top of the platform and vaporized one of the brightly burning body bags. The strategy was working to keep the cannon operator busy while we slipped closer to the platform, mostly invisible.
A second shot six seconds later destroyed the only remaining bag and my AI displayed a countdown timer estimating the weapon's firing rate. The platform gunner would have at least one more shot at us and I steeled myself for the potential that we might lose another crew member. In that time, I was wracked with guilt. I'd put us in this position and sent Matt Matt to his death. The bald truth was, I knew I'd get over his death but in seconds, it could be Noah or even Tabby.
I held my breath as the timer crossed zero, but there was no more fire from the station. I refused to allow myself to believe they no longer tracked us, but I silently hoped. Several heartbeats later, Zaida's suit fired once again. We were at the point she would not survive if she didn't dump her momentum. I refused to breathe as Tonifi's suit also fired. I rocketed past them, my Popeye more suited to high energy landings than the armored vac-suits. Finally, even the mech-suits had to prepare for landing. Noah's suit fired, followed seconds later by mine. Tabby zipped past us all.
I crashed landed onto a wide flat area at the bottom of Elea's mining platform. Upon impact, my suit curled into a ball and I proceeded to plow a furrow into the deck surface. My Popeye had activated what was jokingly called armadillo mode. In this mode, the Popeye's spine extended and the abdomen retracted. It wasn't a perfect ball, but it was plenty round and aided in transferring force and protecting the operator.
The problem, of course, was that it was disorienting. My head swam and my senses were confused as I attempted to right myself and reconcile my orientation to the station. I retched but fortunately nothing came up. My AI, recognizing my predicament, doped me with anti-nausea and the swimmy feeling passed. I had stopped moving.
I checked myself, taking care to carefully inspect my bio scan. I'd pulled muscles in my back and neck but nanites were already actively repairing the damage. Nothing was broken. Really, a good start and better than I expected. I released the armadillo mode and pushed against the deck. There was gravity here, roughly .6g. Unexpected, but I had more important issues to deal with. Instinctively, I checked Tabby's bios – green. Made sense. Noah – yellow. He had a torn tendon in his leg and similar muscle pulls to mine. Surprisingly, Zaida and Tonifi both showed as fully green.
"Form on me," I ordered, establishing comms with the team. We would form a single line with Tabby on point and me just behind her left shoulder. While fighting Kroerak, I'd learned to shoot equally well with my right and left hands, a skill that afforded me flexibility and the ability to compensate for other team members’ weaknesses.
A wave of regret washed over me. I missed having Marny in the second slot. My favorite position was at the back of the pack, looking for trouble that might catch us from behind. Marny was a natural at working us through tight spots.
"Matt Matt is here," Tonifi said simply.
My stomach did a little flipflop. He'd made it! "Where?" I asked, still not showing him on my bio signatures. I added her viewport to my HUD and blinked hard. Twenty meters from where she stood, Matt Matt had impacted the deck. His remains had spread over a large area, already freezing as vacuum leached moisture from the viscera.
"Tonifi, move it!" Tabby snapped.
I adjusted our formation so Zaida and Tonifi followed. While we were in the open, I had Zaida beside me, giving her a fire lane on Tabby's right side.
The station was shaped like a thick cross and partially constructed from space debris we’d come across when we’d first entered the system. I'd been part of the House of Bold team who’d designed it. The center stake of the cross was two-kilometers-high and had been constructed from a derelict Abasi craft we'd recovered from deep space. The spacecraft had originally been designed to ferry Felio from Elea's now unusable moon. Kito. It had been built at a time when the Kroerak were threatening and the moon's some fifty thousand inhabitants needed to be evacuated. The ship we'd recovered hadn't made it and had been shot up by Kroerak and left to sail forever into the deep dark.
Gas mining on a gas planet wasn't exactly what you might initially think. Sure, the center stake of the station employed complicated physics to draw off Elea's gasses. The long runs of tubing and electrostatically charged chambers converted gasses into all manner of usable and very sellable products, only some of which remained in gaseous form. As it turned out, useable spaceship fuel was probably the least valuable of these products, although likely the largest volume of anything produced. The process for creating usable fuel was well known, if not expensive.
The horizontal beam structure of the station was used for storage. From a distance, squat cylindrical containers were stacked and lashed together in columns like someone had slid together stacks of broad urns and lashed them together. At least to the extent an urn might be measured in giga-liters.
I'd chosen to land at the bottom of the station for two practical reasons: nothing interesting seemed to be going on down here and all the shooting had come from the top of the station. The cannon was a new feature since the time of my involvement in construction. Fortunately, Mom had shared schematics with us that were as recent as fifteen years ago.
"What's the play, Hoffen?" Tabby asked as we ducked under a quagmire of pipe chases.
I slaved my suit to follow her while I worked on tactics. I had a plan on how to get through the station. Of course, the old idiom, no plan survives contact with the enemy seemed like more of a rule than a guideline.
"I've got contact," Tabby breathed into her mic.
17
Curiosity
A yellow outline bounced four hundred meters from our position. I signaled for the team to hold. Whoever was running the platform had to know our location. They would either send a large force to take us out or a smaller force to scout us.
My AI overlaid details of the station with my visual data-stream. So far, the details were consistent with what we were seeing. We caught a break as the yellow outline stopped in the open, giving my AI an unobstructed view. The Mendari soldier scanned the area, swiveling its head back and forth. A moment later a second and then a third soldier joined the group.
"What are they looking for?" Tabby whispered. Technically, the Popeye didn’t allow sound transmission through the helmets, but the instinct to speak quietly was hard to overcome.
"Us," Noah offered.
"Doesn't look like it," I said. "They're scanning a large area. Our position shouldn't be in question. Something's off. Everyone, hold tight."
I rolled through a menu on my Popeye and located a snooper round. Popeye's weren't used in stealth roles for a pretty obvious reason – their big, lumbering forms weren’t exactly sneaky. In this situation, however, I felt snooper rounds might be a good option. I waited for all three Mendari to be scanning away from my position, aimed a shot at a nearby pipe that would give us a better view, and fired.
For a moment, I thought I'd been discovered. One of the three Mendari turned and looked our way. He glanced back at his compatriots and then continued his scan. I had stayed completely still but used the first opportunity to meld further back into the stack of pipes where we apparently were well hidden.
"Twelve-O-One, patrol said they traced an object struck by the Overseer's cannon fire to this location," one of the three said.
"Like before, we will only find their splattered remains," another answered. "I was one of those that located the last. The velocity of their impact left no remains larger than what I can spit. This is a waste of time. We must prepare for the fleet's return. The Overseer is upset at the loss of her shipment. We may be required to take action."
"That is not for one such as you to decide," the first speaker said. "We will search as we have been instructed or you know as well as I that we will be placed at the great doors if we must fight the Overseer."
"You should not speak of things aloud," the third said. "The Overseer might have listening equipment."
"She knows the fleet returns without supplies," the first said. "What other purpose would they have in their return if not to unseat the Overseer? She knows this already. Do you believe she has nothing better to occupy her time than to listen to chattel such as us? No. We do our jobs and pray that our betters accept our efforts."
"She destroyed a ship already," the second said. "There was no negotiation."
"That ship ran from battle and entered her space," the third argued. "It was her right to destroy it."
"Why did she not destroy the godless ship, then?"
"It is not ours to know. Now get to patrol or upon my next meeting, I will report your laziness," the first said.
"I could kill you and you would have nothing to report," the second growled.
"Our commander would notice my departure and you would be forced to plug in. Your soft parts would be torn away and replaced once your attack became known. Now spread out and search. If we find more remains, the commander will be satisfied with our work."
"I don't think they've got comms," Noah whispered.
I had the same feeling, but it didn’t make sense. "Why?" I asked. "That's a huge disadvantage."
"I think it's more interesting that there are two interests here," Tabby said. "Who's this Overseer? Another Mendari faction? And what's that gate they're talking about bum-rushing?"
"Hold that thought," I said.
The Mendari patrol was moving down the corridor in our direction. I'd always known it would come to a fight, but my stomach clenched as I worked through the possible scenarios. In our Popeyes, we were easily a match for any individual Mendari soldier. At three meters, we were a head shorter than the Mendari, but our armor had no soft vulnerabilities.
"Zaida, Tonifi, you stay out of the fight," I ordered. "Tabbs, Noah, no blaster fire unless you have no other choice."
"What do I use then?" Noah asked.
It was a trap I kept falling into. Noah reminded me so much of myself that I had difficulty remembering we had none of the same experiences.
"Guard Zaida and Tonifi," I said. "Watch how Tabby and I engage."
"Understood," he answered. I heard the hurt in his voice and appreciated that he didn't push the conversation further.
I marked the two lead Mendari as primary and secondary. If we were using blasters, we'd focus fire on one at a time, burning down one target completely, then the next. In hand-to-hand, however, position in the line actually indicated which target each of us would engage. As Tabby was point, she would take primary and so forth. I'd have to be creative for the third Mendari, keeping him interested enough so he didn't engage Noah and the rest of the group.
