Gabriel: Zero Point (Evan Gabriel Trilogy) (6 page)

The limpet mine was unexpected.

Chapter 8

After the fact, Gabriel would come to realize that what saved him from the explosion was not his upgraded neuretics, or his augmented body, but his natural reactions — and his memory of the asteroid mission. His memories, as he thought later on, while painful, had saved his life.

As he stepped into the corridor, a flicker of memory from that mission flickered. He and his team, in microgravity, made their way between two of the prefab units. Gilly was point man, and Gabriel was a few dozen yards behind, with the gap growing. Gilly’s quick pace stirred up dust into a cloud that hung in the airless environment. They were maintaining comm silence, so Gabriel had no way to tell Gilly to slow his movement. He wanted to push forward, grab the young seaman by his shoulder, but his own heavy boots and reverse retro thrusters, designed to keep the team grounded in less than .02G, slowed him.

He was about to send a point-to-point neuretics burst when he saw a lump on the side of the prefab Gilly was passing. It was most certainly out of place; the color was whiter and the area was cleaner than the rest of the dirty, graying prefab unit. And Gilly didn’t see it.
 

Silence secondary at this point, Gabriel toggled the comm and shouted, but it was too late. The IED attached to the prefab detonated, probably a proximity sensor Gabriel later reported. Shrapnel tore into Gilly, throwing his body heavily into the prefab on the opposite side of the crude path the team walked. Gilly bounced off the plastic wall and skipped along the surface of the asteroid.
 

Gabriel yelled into the comm. “Active sensors, spread out! Rush all units, go!”

He switched off his retros and shoved off the surface. He angled his body forward and engaged the thrusters again, this time reversing them. They pushed him forward a few feet above the surface towards Gilly. He knew before he arrived the nineteen year old was gone. When he grabbed his drifting body, he saw Gilly’s face through his helmet visor locked in anguish. His skin was puckered with blisters from the decompression, and the blood that leaked from his mouth, nose, and eyes had frozen into dark stains.

The limpet mine on the wall of the corridor was thin, barely an inch in depth, and was all but unnoticeable. However, the color was a slightly darker shade of industrial gray than the corridor, and the overhead light strip cast the barest of shadows underneath its raised bump. But the corner of his eye caught it, just a split second before it detonated.

He turned his upper body away from the mine, taking his right hand off the pulse rifle and shielding his face with his forearm while he twisted towards the opposite wall and dropped to one knee. The mine was head-height, and he was counting on it being directional, like what had killed Gilly. If it was a wide-dispersal Claymore type, he didn’t have a chance.

The explosion was deafening in the narrow corridor. His ears instantly popped, and he felt multiple impacts on his right arm and right side of his face. He completed his twist and drop and felt heat wash over his upper back. He dropped to all fours, the rifle clattering to the floor, and coughed with the impact of the pressure wave.
 

His neuretics alarms pinged incessantly. His ears rang like a thousand church bells, and he shook his head to clear the noise. He opened his eyes and saw the rifle through the smoke that filled the corridor. The acrid tang of spent explosives mixed with the pungent odor of burned plastic assaulted his nose, and he coughed again to clear his airway. He grabbed the rifle and sent the arming command again, receiving an operational status.

His neuretics gave one more alarm: the closest gunman had entered his line of sight down the sloping tunnel. His vision was blurred from the shock and the corridor obscured with gray-black smoke, but his neuretics painted a perfect tactical picture in his Mindseye.

Energy pulses sizzled past Gabriel. The gunman fired blindly into the smoke, hoping his target was low and still near the lab door. Gabriel’s quick move away from the mine to the opposite wall saved him again.
 

He ordered the tactical scan projected into his internal heads-up, and a red icon appeared, just over a hundred feet away and moving rapidly towards him. He turned and rose on one knee, brought his own rifle up, and linked the sights with his neuretics. Though it was a cheap Chinese knockoff of the M-74, it still possessed the same electronic targeting systems.
 

Blue crosshairs centered on the approaching icon, and Gabriel pressed the trigger pad. Three coherent light bursts spat from the end of the blocky barrel, disappearing into the smoke, leaving twisting vortexes in their wakes. The incoming fire ceased immediately, and the red icon stopped moving.
 

He stood up and grabbed for the wall as dizziness washed over him. The smoke began to clear as Cielo’s environmental systems attempted to process the air. The sharp burnt odor was still present, and reminded him of the scorched mud he trekked across during the Canary Islands campaign. Smells were the most powerful triggers of memories, he had been told once. He’d just as soon get rid of the memories as well as the smells.

His right arm began to throb, and he felt something sticky on the right side of his face. He wiped the blood off his cheek and rubbed his hand on his pant leg to clean it off. He felt the sting of several small cuts, but no major damage, and his vision was no longer impaired. Glancing at his bloody arm, he wasn’t as confident, but for now it still worked, and he had two more targets that knew where he was now.

The ringing in his ears subsided to the point where he could hear the air recyclers whirring above him. The smoke had all but cleared, and he could now visually see the fallen gunman down the corridor. He was sprawled face-first on the floor, another M-74 copy lying a few feet in front of the body.
 

With a quick check of his pulse rifle’s charge, he took off at a run towards the gunman’s body when the lights went out in the corridor, plunging it into darkness.

Chapter 9

Gabriel froze in mid-sprint and waited, listening. No sound but the overhead air recyclers. He tapped into Cielo’s security system for the video feed, but was greeted with static feedback. The system was offline along with the lighting. He was blind in more ways than one. But so were the remaining two hostiles. And he still had his heads-up fed by his own scans.

He pressed his back against the wall and reached out with a passive scan. He detected the signs of the two hostiles. They had stopped moving when the lights went out; they appeared to have been caught off-guard as he was, or perhaps it was another part of a larger orchestrated plan.
Orchestrated
. He rolled that word around in his head for a few moments. The dogged hatch, the limpet mine, the gauntlet of gunman, the security feed outage. Even the blood drops in the lab. All were pointing to a set strategy. But by whom or why, he had no idea. He only knew he had a missing doctor and captain. And a target.

His heads-up showed the location of the room where the remote wipe transmission originated. No activity or electronic leakage from the room, and no sign of life inside, though he dismissed that as inconclusive. The thick steel walls of Cielo prevented much of a passive scan from seeing through, and the target room was no exception.

The other two hostiles hid behind the next elevator bay, so they were still over a hundred yards away. He cautiously moved up the corridor, hugging the wall, and approached where the downed gunman lay. Suddenly Cielo’s backup lighting kicked in, and strips along the walls inches above the floor lit with a light blue glow.
 

The gunman was a woman, he saw as he kneeled down beside the body. Her lifeless face was turned towards him, eyes open. The blue lighting made her skin appear ghostly white and her eyes black. Her close-cropped hair showing from under the half helmet was unisex, almost military style, unlike the two men in the lab, but there was no doubt it was a woman.

Gabriel rocked back on his heels and set the pulse rifle across his knees.
A woman.
He knew she was a combatant, someone tasked with killing him, and had even fired first, but something deep down inside of him hurt. He had killed before; had actually become quite good at it in the past few years, even received a commendation as an enlisted man after an operation in South Africa after singlehandedly taking down a particle cannon nest manned with four gunners.
 

But none of them were women.
 

No one he had ever faced and defeated in combat was a woman.
 

It made a difference.

The body had three burn holes in the back of the armor. His shots were straight and true and had dropped her immediately. Quick and painless. A twinge of discomfort from his right arm coursed through his system.
Maybe not completely painless
.
 

He took one last look at the woman’s unseeing eyes, and thought back to the bloody pullover in the lab. He clenched his teeth, remembering there was still a woman he needed to find.

He noticed the woman had a waist pouch strapped to her body armor. He leaned over and unsnapped the pouch. Inside were two frag grenades and two gas canisters. He grabbed the frags and shoved them into his left thigh pocket. He shifted the pulse rifle from his right arm to his left and picked up one of the gas grenades. The black stencil on its silver surface read, “CS-30.” His neuretics immediately ran the code through a database and displayed “2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile 30-s” across his Mindseye image. He frowned and reprocessed the data, asking for plain English.
Tear Gas - Temporary Effect
, came the response.
Well, these might come in handy
. He put both into his right thigh pocket.

He pushed up from his kneeling position and checked the position of the other two hostiles. They were taking advantage of the cover provided by the far elevator bay and stayed motionless. He glanced in that direction. The elevator bay where the dead woman had been hiding was just twenty feet away. He had a choice: take cover behind this bay and wait for the hostiles to come to him, or take the fight to them. He squeezed the pulse rifle’s trigger guard and knew what his strategy would be.
 

Still shoeless, Gabriel took off at a dead run.

The icons hadn’t moved. Both were still behind the defilade created by the wide elevator bay. At this distance, still over two hundred feet, Gabriel wasn’t able to determine their armament, but based on the last three, he had to assume pulse rifles and possibly grenades.

Grenades.
As he ran, holding the rifle with his undamaged left arm, he patted his right thigh pocket and felt the two tear gas grenades. He remembered the other three hostiles had half helmets only, no gas protection. If the other two were the same, he could use their own weapons against them.

He slowed to a jog, 140 feet from the bay. The icons were still unmoving, but he had no doubt they heard the explosion and the rifle fire. They were waiting for him. He pulled one gas grenade from his pocket and his mouth twitched in a small smile.
They may be waiting for someone, but they probably aren’t expecting me
, he thought as he flicked the arming switch.
 

He stepped his pace back up to a sprint and threw the grenade overhand. It bounced once a few feet from the elevator bay, then detonated with a flash and pop. Smoke spewed from the top of the canister as it rolled past the elevator bay and came to a stop just feet from where Gabriel’s heads-up showed the hostiles taking cover.

It wasn’t long before two gasping, choking forms came out from behind the bay. Gabriel was on them in seconds. The closest one to him brought his rifle up with one hand while the other hand pawed at his face. Gabriel knocked the rifle aside with his own and smashed the stock into the man’s face. The man staggered backwards into his partner, who at least had the good sense to throw the man aside and bring a magnetic pistol to bear.

Gabriel’s momentum from his run carried him into the second man and the two crashed together. Gabriel heard the pistol click twice before the two of them fell to the floor, and his neuretics blared an impact alarm in his head.
 

As they landed in a heap, Gabriel slammed his pulse rifle into the forearm of the other man’s gun hand. The gunman cried out in pain as bones shattered, and the pistol fell from his grip. Gabriel pulled his other hand back, curled it into a fist, and swung. The impact of his fist with the new power of enhanced muscles snapped the man’s jaw, and his eyes rolled up into his head. He fell to the floor, gurgling coming from his throat. He lay still as blood pooled under his mouth.

Gabriel looked over at the other man, who was lying on his side, unconscious and bleeding from his shattered nose. He stood up from the second man and rubbed his eyes. The tear gas was as advertised, a temporary effect. It smoked out the two men, but dissipated in a matter of seconds.
Either that or my systems have been upgraded more so than I was told.

He looked down at the two men. One was out cold with a badly broken nose. The other had several broken bones, including one that, if treated soon, would have him eating through a straw for a long time. If not treated… He clenched his fist and felt the power of the augmented muscle fibers.
 

HAMR indeed.

His neuretics pinged again and projected a medical diagnostic. He looked at the image in Mindseye and saw that in addition to the wounds from the explosions, apparently he had taken one of the two pistol rounds the second man had fired. Just below his rib cage, on his left side, a through-and-through. Now he was bleeding from at least half a dozen wounds, and while none were life threatening, he’d need medical attention soon. Or at least some bandages. He thought back to Knowles’s description of the medpack and wished he had completed the procedure before all of this shit went down.
 

Knowles
. He pulled the station schematic up. The target room was just on the other side of the next elevator bay, so he was less than 500 feet from his destination. He reached down to pick up his pulse rifle and noticed the barrel was cracked where he had slammed it into the hostile’s arm. He frowned and kicked it aside. The broken jawed man armed with only the mag pistol. Gabriel grabbed it and tucked it into his waistband, then picked up the first man’s pulse rifle. As with the first one, his neuretics tapped into the code lock and armed it. He felt the tingle of connection in his hand and turned towards his target.