Prison Break (Star Breaker Book 5), page 5
“Ah . . .” Holly stated. She hadn’t actually meant to kill the guy.
This doctor, she was thinking as she struggled to her feet. The guards are in on the breakout, and they’re after someone called the doc.
And . . . she remembered grimly that the other one on the end of the line had said that they had Bastion, Marshal, Dr. Crow, and the injured Marine surrounded . . .
7
It’s too quiet, Bastion Li was thinking as he paused before entering the octagonal control room at the heart of the main facility. It was one of those central rooms with four open doorways leading into it and with a guard booth in the middle with absolutely no one in it.
“How far is it?” he heard the doctor asking from behind him. “Medical,” she confirmed. “Our man here . . .”
Our man. Bastion approved of the fact that she called him that. It at least showed him that she considered herself a part of this team.
Even if there were questions about what she was doing here in the first place.
“Straight across,” Bastion said, pausing before he moved in. There was something that tickled in the back of his mind. Something that he didn’t like about this situation. Although if he was pressed for an answer about what that was—it would just be that he didn’t like the silence.
“The alarms and sirens are off,” Bastion announced. “And the guards have vanished.”
“Off securing the prisoners?” Crow offered.
“No sound of that,” Bastion murmured to himself—although he wasn’t sure how much sound he should be expecting. Gunfire? Shouts? “I’m guessing that only someone with authorization would have disabled the alarms.”
“Which doesn’t entirely make sense,” the doctor said. “Because a general alarm on this facility will trigger an instant call to the nearest Outer Command vessel. And because I was on it recently,” Crow informed him, “I know that it is out at the uhr . . .”
“The Thaal site?” Bastion offered.
“Yes.”
“How do you know about the alarm?!” Marshal pointed out, his tone full of rising suspicion. “I thought you said you were a scientist?”
“I am. But a very well-placed one,” Dr Crow stated. “I was told that, just in case anything went, well, sideways . . .”
“Like it already has, you mean,” Marshal understated.
“Exactly. Then I was supposed to set off the alarms, triggering an emergency response from the nearest military vessel,” the doctor said. She checked Lieutenant Chibi once more. “Look, we really have to make a move—I don’t think we can wait much longer.”
“Okay.” Bastion nodded, although internally, he was thinking, Why were you expecting things to go sideways? Just what was your mission brief anyway?
But whatever the answers to those questions were, he knew that the doctor was right. They had to get this man to medical whatever the cost.
“Okay.” Bastion gritted his teeth. He didn’t like it. It was still too quiet. “Marshal, you’re on right. I’ll take left.”
“Aye.” Sergeant Smith smoothly moved ahead to wait. Then, on Bastion’s nod, they stepped into the octagonal control room, crossing the space to the nearest corridors to the right and left.
Alert!
Just as soon as they got there and wheeled their guns around to cover the corridors—they were lit up by approaching gunfire.
“Back! Cover!” Bastion was demanding. Rachel saw the ricochet of bullets flying off of the exposed shoulder pads of his suit and more bullets obliterating the thickened glass of the central guard booth, hammering against the walls and floor.
There were shooters down both right and left corridors. And they had been waiting for them.
“Ach!” Marshal was spun around, flying forwards instead of back—absurdly towards their destination, but doing so because a section of his suit—his leg—was now spilling sparks and puffs of escaping gasses.
“Smith! You okay?!” Bastion shouted as he scooted himself back towards Crow, firing first at one and then the next corridor. His aim was angled, and there was no way that he could hit the shooters, but it kept them back, whomever they were.
“No I’m not okay, stars dammit!” Marshal swore back. He was crouching at the other end of the room behind the smashed-up guard booth. “How many times am I going to get pinned down today?! This is hardly fair!” he complained. Another hail of bullets answered, and there came a crashing sound as the last of the glass exploded and was pulverized over his head.
“Frackit!” Marshal shouted, squirming lower.
“They’ve got a kill line. We might be able to jump across,” Bastion was saying—when Rachel suddenly realized what had happened.
Lieutenant Chibi slumped forward—because several of the ricochet bullets had struck him.
“No! The lieutenant!” Crow was shouting. “No—he got hit!”
Bastion snarled in anger, turning to see the man slide to the floor, and his own heads-up display alerted him to the same thing.
Alert! CRITICAL!
Chibi, H (Lt): Deceased . . .
No, Bastion was thinking. No, no, no!
How could this simple wait mission have gone so wrong? What had gone so wrong?!
And then, in that moment, everything that had happened and what Crow had told him crystalized for him. It made sense on a tactical level.
The alarms. The silence. Even the explosion.
“The guards must have been in on it,” he growled. “They staged the whole thing. Maybe even staged the breakout. They’re the only ones who could have cut the sirens and set up the explosion that took out the Stalwart. This isn’t a prisoner breakout. It’s a mutiny.
“The doc!” Crow hissed behind him. Marshal tried to move, and yet another hail of bullets pushed him back again.
“Dammit!” Marshal said.
“What do you mean—the doc?” Bastion was firing the best he could down both corridors, and he was sure that he could see shapes moving down there too. Shapes in the same sorts of encounter suits that the prison guards had, ducking and waiting behind pipes and doorways before firing into the control room. They were quickly turning it into a merry-go-round of death. How long before another of his people got the same treatment from a ricochet that Lieutenant Chibi just had?
And a Marine went down on my watch, he was thinking as a dark rage filled him.
But what can I do? I charge one corridor, the other will light me up. Was that all they were left with, to lie here and wait for the end?
“CEASEFIRE! Ceasefire!” A new voice arrived, and Bastion realized that he recognized it. It was PO Markson and gone was the earlier smirking self-importance and the apparent alarm at the supposed “breakout.”
A few of the ever-hopeful attacker’s shots continued, but they petered out after another roar from Markson.
“We’ve got you, Marines. Do yourselves a favor and give up! You know this can go bloody and brutal, but there’s no need for that. We’re not here for you. We’re here for the doc and Crow,” Markson announced.
“Me?” Rachel Crow turned to look aghast at Bastion. Across the room, Marshal was mouthing silent obscenities back at their aggressor.
“What do you want with her? Who’s this doc of yours?!” Bastion didn’t even skip a beat.
“Orders are orders, Marine. You know the drill!” Markson announced, his voice coming a little closer down one of the corridors. “We’ve got you pinned and surrounded. You haven’t got a chance, even with all your fancy gear. Just hand her over, and we’re gone. We promise you don’t have to die . . .”
“What a load of frack,” Marshal whispered loudly enough so that everyone could hear, and both Bastion and Rachel nodded to agree. What was going to stop these prison guards from shooting them all in the head when they were done?
“Not going to happen,” Bastion called out. “You’ll have to come and get her, and if you do that, then I’ve got a bullet waiting right here for you.”
“Well, we can do that too, of course.” Markson laughed, just as Rachel saw a movement out of the corner of her eye. Another person had entered the fight.
“Not to my people you won’t, fracker!” Holly Cropper said as she stepped out past the doctor, raised her newly acquired grenade launcher, and fired.
The shot went clean into the nearest corridor. Holly turned and fired into the next, and the explosions were so close that they were almost in sync.
Billows of thick, gray smoke immediately burst out of both of the corridors amidst the sounds of screaming metals. Inside his heavy suit, even with all of its protections, Bastion felt the concussion wave push him backwards, and the speakers crackled into a high whine of interference.
No one could see anything anymore, and everywhere was a fog-filled chaos.
“C’mon! Move it! On your feet, Marine!” Holly was shouting as Bastion pulled Rachel to her feet. Even inside her suit, her ears were probably ringing, and everything had to be awfully confusing—but through the fog, he saw the slice of brilliant blue-white suit lights as Holly shoved them all back before grabbing Marshal.
“Move your butts! I don’t care if you’re injured!” Holly demanded, as she shoved and ran back the way they had come. The captain of the Forward Recon squad fired another couple grenades, and then it was all about getting as far away as they could.
8
“There! Pick up the rifles! Grab the extra ammo belts!” Holly was saying as they sprinted, jogged, and hopped back to the main hangar lounge while the sounds of muffled gunfire erupted in the facility behind them.
Rachel was easily outpaced by the others, but saw that Holly had already left a tripod of guns and strange military equipment in the center of the hold. There were three propped rifles, and Holly had one.
“Here.” Bastion threw Rachel one, and she caught it (somewhat unexpectedly) and hugged it to her chest. “You know how to use it?”
“No time,” Holly said, passing one to Marshal before locating some sort of spray bottle from the pile of equipment and liberally applying it all over the damaged part of Marshal’s leg.
“Rachel—pick up the mobile transmitter,” Holly said, spinning around to aim at the corridor they had just come out of. She burst fire down it. There were no answering screams or shouts, so there was no way to tell if any of her shots had hit or not—but she fired three bursts anyway.
“That’ll keep ’em thinking,” Holly said. Rachel was picking up what Bastion had passed to her—a reinforced plastic backpack on webbing straps.
“Here.” He looped them onto her back and then said, “Try not to get shot in the back.”
“I’ll try not to get shot at all,” Rachel was saying as Marshal and Bastion grabbed a few more things from their recovered equipment pile, and then Holly was directing them to the emergency chute. In the middle of the chaos, Rachel was struck with how quickly the group moved as one. This tiny squad, the very one that had been at the center of so much over the past two years—at the very heart of the imminent alien invasion—acted and worked together as one organism, despite all of their foul language and their apparent mockery of each other.
“What’s the plan, boss?” Marshal said as Bastion wrenched open the emergency air lock. He was already making his way through with Marshal behind, then Rachel, then Holly.
“I guess you remember that our only ride home is now the slagged pile of garbage out there?” Marshal pointed out as Holly slammed the door home, and Bastion pulled the depressurization lever.
“Yes, I am fully aware of that, Sergeant,” Holly said. “We’re not going for the Stalwart or off Pluto at all.”
“What?” Marshal whispered.
“We’re heading out onto the ice. To the Massif,” she said sternly.
The depressurization cycle completed, and Bastion opened the outer hatch to the howl of a Plutonian ice storm.
“We’re going after this doctor that everyone is talking about.” Holly nodded for Bastion to go before flinging a sharp glance up at Rachel.
“And our own Dr. Crow here is going to tell us everything she knows about the situation, right, Doctor?” the captain said.
“Ah.” Rachel nodded. She had wondered when they were going to demand answers from her.
“You’re right,” Dr. Crow stated as the Plutonian ice winds howled about them.
Their world had become a series of flashing, disorienting monochrome images of white, muted gray, and black. The doctor was surprised that such a desolate planet like Pluto had any wind at all—but Marshal informed her that the air currents were probably the result of distant seismic activity or an eruption of one of the many cryovolcanoes—literal ice mountains that spewed frost and hail over the surface. And Pluto was big enough to have some gravity, so she assumed that meant that it also could hold some sort of erratic, frail atmosphere too.
The group had struck out from the Pluto Prison Facility as soon as their boots had touched the ground, with Captain Holly Cropper setting a hard and punishing pace into this alien, frosted wilderness. The doctor quickly copied the others’ long, lunging strides that were somewhere between leaping and running, using the scant gravity in order to hurl themselves farther and deeper into the white and gray.
They were heading for a distant rise on the horizon—the Massif—as Holly had called it, which was apparently the last place where this doctor had been heading.
Dr. Metz, the doctor confirmed. She had guessed that by now, and the captain had finally called for them to pause at the base of one of the ridges of black rock. All of the visors of her attendant Forward Recon squad had turned to her. Now was the time to divulge what she knew.
“Yes, you’re right. There is more to my mission than just interviewing you,” she repeated, trying to cram herself a little tighter against the rock wall. She was amazingly still warm inside of her suit, given the sophisticated engineering and development that had gone into making space a not-so-completely-murderous environment for the human body—but it was nonetheless uncomfortable. The Plutonian gale buffeted and pushed at them whenever they poked their heads from the ridge, and her suit microphones were filled with the constant static hiss of hail and rock-dust particles hammering them.
“I have been working on the Thaal star vessel,” Crow said by way of explanation.
Well, not just me. Her thoughts flashed to her robotic companion, “The Duke,” who had been dispatched to the new Thaal site, leaving her with the messy job of actually talking to humans.
“I’m sure you all know the gravity of the situation,” Crow said, slipping easily into lecture mode. The Thaal star vessel was a giant ship shaped like an eight-pointed star and made of a strange whitish metal that appeared almost organic under investigation. It had arrived in human space a little over eighteen months ago, apparently called by the ancient ruins that this very Forward Recon squad had discovered at the Trojan asteroid site.
“We now believe that it must have been some kind of automated vessel like a first-response craft,” Crow indicated.
“The robots,” Holly interrupted, sharing a nod with Bastion and Marshal. Alien-built robots had awakened at the Trojan site, coldly efficient killing machines that had sought to protect the alien beacon at all costs. And later, their bodies and technology had been stolen and replicated by the Zenetic megacorporation on Venus, profiting from disaster.
“Yes, the star vessel, at first, appeared to be entirely preprogrammed to arrive at the alien beacon and set in motion a train of events that would allow some sort of hyperspace gate to be built . . .”
“You doobery-what now?” Marshal murmured irritably. The man was in pain, and it didn’t appear to add anything to his mood, which was generally set between sarcasm and insufferable criticism.
“Sergeant.” Holly gave a warning tone to Marshal Smith before nodding for Rachel to continue.
“A hyperspace gate,” Rachel said again. “At least, that is the best description that the Duke has to explain what your reports have included.”
“The Duke?” Holly asked immediately.
“Our military AI,” the doctor stated. “He—it, I mean—is a strategy-analysis construct. They used to be commissioned to run the Mars Marine Training Program.”
“Well, that explains why that was so stars-awful,” everyone heard Marshal mutter under his breath.
Rachel paused, wondering if the soldiers—sorry, Marines—would react the same way that she had at encountering a fully functioning AI. None of them appeared to bat an eyelid. Perhaps Rachel shouldn’t have been so surprised by this. Limited constructs had been in place for almost ten years now. Usually, they were servitors and personality programs that interfaced between humans and apps, or they might be used as station guides. The doctor figured that these Marines probably just assumed that the Duke was another one of those—a glorified personal assistant for the military commanders.
No matter. She went on.
“In your last two reports,” Rachel nodded at Holly, “you described the energy field’s disk or portal which you said that the Thaal had summoned,”
The captain was still, and her voice, when it came back over the suit mics, was laced with tension. “I did,” she said.
“That is, on best analysis, the hyperspace gate. Or the beginnings of one, anyway,” Rachel said. “As you recall, the star vessel called by the Thaal beacons already in our system detached smaller vessels from its surface upon reaching our space. We believe that process to be an automated part of the invasion plan too. They arrived at Triton, where—”
“We know what happened,” Bastion cut in a little harshly. Rachel nodded tactfully. Of course. These were the very people who had seen the cryogenically frozen Thaal step out of those small vessels. Those were the actual invaders, the alien race attempting to take them over.
