Theirs Not To Reason Why: A Soldier's Duty (51 page)

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Authors: Jean Johnson

BOOK: Theirs Not To Reason Why: A Soldier's Duty
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Using her momentum to half leap, half run up a wall next to a ladder way, she grabbed for the rungs and scrambled up through the open hatchway. This was an escape ladder, designed to take personnel from the biodome up above all the way down into the basement levels of the settlement. Flinging her mind ahead of her, she unlatched and opened each hatchway electrokinetically, saving the time needed to do it manually.
Even in such light gravity, she was nearly breathless by the time she reached the roof of the building she wanted. Sucking in deep lungfuls, Ia crouched on the grass-lined roof and pulled one of the pistols stuck into the waistband of her pants. Panting, she carefully braced it on the raised edge of the building and searched for her targets.
This wasn’t a military-calibrated rifle with a sniper scope. This was a jury-rigged handgun aimed by eye and mind. She would have just enough time for three crucial shots before having to run back. Off to the right, she could see plumes of smoke from where the tech raiders were holding off the 3rd Platoon at the edge of the dome. Both sides were trying to be careful about shooting too high; neither wanted to pierce the triple-layered, strut-latticed bubbles protecting them from the vacuum of space. The raiders, because they didn’t have any protective pressure-suits on hand, and her fellow Marines, because they knew the civilian hostages in this dome didn’t have any suits, either.
There! The reinforcements!
The group responsible for this raid, certain members of an undergalactic crime organization calling itself the Lyebariko—which translated as
Library
in some half-forgotten Terran language—had prepared well for this siege. Their makeshift troops were hauling another trio of jury-rigged laser drills off to the right, visible intermittently between the office-like buildings and the trees of the biosphere’s central park. Scraping the butt of the pistol slightly along the roof edge, Ia aimed and pulled the trigger, spearing a bright yellow light down at that distant street.
And missed.
Swearing under her breath, she aimed at her second target, the first now obscured again by the park. Slowing her breath, she concentrated, firing between heartbeats. On to the third, letting the brief slash of orange light lance through the trees . . . and a dip into the timestreams, firing blindly through the foliage at her first target once more.
Success.
The laser drills were now damaged at critical points. Two had slagged power buttons, and the middle one had a damaged conduit socket. When they tried to plug it into a power source, the drill would explode. Sparing just enough time to use a bit of rumpled bandaging to erase evidence she had used the gun, Ia tossed it over the edge of the building and jumped back down the ladder way. Hands flying, feet flicking, slapping and tapping the rungs to control her descent, she “fell” all seven floors back down to ground level, then through the chute another four levels to the basement where she had entered.
Increasing each slap to a grab slowed her drop enough to land without hurting herself. From there, it was a sprint back down the long hallway, a leap down the stairs, two turns and another turn. Back into the heat and the dust . . . which she had forgotten about. Hastily hauling her borrowed shirt up over her nose and mouth, Ia squinted against the debris and aimed her second pistol at the middle drill, burning into the machinery’s housing with its over-clocked, clip-draining beam.
Too many damned things to keep track of, today . . .
Whirling, she crouched, ducking a mere second below the flying debris as the drill’s crystal matrix cracked and shattered. The blast knocked her onto the overheated floor, but none of the parts slammed into her. The explosion also knocked the other two drills into the walls, damaging them. One spat sparks and smoke, but no more deadly beams. The other continued to fire, but now that it was wedged at an angle between floor and wall, it could no longer aim at anything.
“Corporal? . . . Corporal Ia, is that you?”
The mechsuit-amplified shout sounded a little tinny. It was also accompanied by a faint ringing. Rising, Ia shook her head and focused inward, on healing the damage from her ears. Within seconds, the tinnitus stopped, allowing her to shout back, “The drills have been disabled, Sergeant! You’re free to move up—and bring me my wrist unit! Someone also needs to shoot this last drill to shut it up. I’m out of juice.”
She flicked the safety on the laser pistol and tucked it back into her waistband. Unlike the other one, this one’s e-clip had started out nearly full, not nearly empty. There was still more good she could do with the confiscated weapon.
Sergeant Baker eased around the corner, followed by Estes. There was enough room for a full-mechsuit to move without worrying about anything but the occasional chunk of debris; the tilted, immobilized drill was busy trying to dig a new, shallow-angled path in the side of the stone corridor. Seeing the way was free, the pair moved up to her position. Ia retreated quickly, taking refuge behind Estes’ half-mechsuited bulk, in case anything else exploded. A steady shot from the permanent cannon mounted on the sergeant’s armor silenced the firing drill, then killed the one still spitting sparks on the other side.
Double-E and Harkins moved up and the four Marines quickly moved the remainder of the drills out of the way, allowing the others the room to approach. Baker offered Ia her wrist unit, clasped in the delicate tips of his servo hands. “You gonna crawl back into your armor, soldier?”
Ia shook her head. “I have dust in places I don’t even want to think about, Sergeant. I’d rather not grind it in deeper with the pressure of a p-suit, and I definitely don’t want to gunk up the gears if I put my mechsuit back on without one.” Clasping the unit onto her left forearm, she glanced briefly at her olive drab clothes and gave him a wry smile. “Besides, the few insurgents I saw while looking for a weapon, they were all wearing this army-surplus stuff, and not all of it was clean.
“Cover up my too-white hair with a hat or a handkerchief, and I figure I could blend in enough to do a little enemy infiltration. After all, they’re expecting the Marines to show up in ceristeel mech armor, guns blazing, not strolling along the streets in Army Greens,” Ia pointed out, plucking at her borrowed fatigues.
“Good idea, Corporal.” That came from Lt. D’kora, who had moved up between the haphazard ranks. “You must have done a little bit of scouting, to get that gun in your waistband. I’ll trust you also made sure no one reported your little foray to the rest of the enemy.”
“No, sir. I didn’t give them a chance for that, sir,” she promised.
“Good. Show us what you found.”
Nodding, Ia turned and headed up the passage at a trot. Behind her, the others followed, their mechsuited weight making the ground tremble. It wouldn’t take long to show them the first storage room and its plethora of bodies. Nor would it be all that difficult to “hear” the stirrings of the trapped colonists in the other chambers. She knew D’kora would assign D Squad to give them escort back down the tunnel, sending the civilian researchers and workers back toward the other domed settlements scattered over a fifty kilometer radius on this corner of Oberon’s Rock.
Better for them to be well out of the way if and when the Lyebariko’s raiders decided to counterattack. Or grab more hostages to hold off the military. Things which Ia intended to prevent. Once the civilians in this sector were freed, she would be free as well. Free to head deeper through the dome city, and the heart of the problem occupying it.
Free to wreck yet another set of lives.
 
The trio of guards at the entrance to the office building eyed her warily when she jogged up. Hand pressed to her side, panting from what looked like a long run, she nodded at them. “Berrimoon. I need to report in. Kittrick got his hands on . . . a military unit. Figured the boss’d want to see it right away.”
The lead guard eyed her warily. She had liberated a long-sleeved shirt to cover up her arm unit, as well as a scrap of cloth to wrap around her distinctive, if gritty, hair. “I don’t think I know you.”
Ia lifted her chin, sassing back, “I don’t think I know
you
, either. This
is
the Fisk Building, on the corner of 5th and Pleiades, isn’t it?” she asked, still breathing hard. Or at least faking it. “If it is, this is where Kittrick told me to report . . . and I see the name Fisk on the front doors, there.”
“You’re supposed to report in person?” the female of the three guards countered. “Why not use our comms?”
“Because the damned Marines have tapped into our frequencies. Half of us got caught in a trap because of it. We got our hands on a military unit,” Ia explained patiently. “You know, and I know, that the boss would kill
you
to get her hands on it. Now, are you gonna let me through, or are you gonna at least send someone up to report our findings to the boss?” she asked, lifting her chin at the upper floors of the white-walled structure.
“I don’t let through anyone I don’t know,” the leader of the trio growled. He shifted his weapon toward her, a black surplus projectile rifle with who knew what loaded into its c-clip. “And I don’t know you.”
His two companions did likewise, pulling their attention from the perimeter of the building. That was the moment she was waiting for. Ia spread her hands up and out. “Then send up my report!”
Deep red zapped in from three angles, triggered by her gesture. Ia snapped her hands down and across, shoving the muzzle of the lead guard’s rifle away from her stomach. The move pressed the trigger guard into his hand, rather than pulled it away . . . which helped prevent his spasming finger from tightening too hard on the trigger. The weapon didn’t fire. Ia sighed in relief, sidestepping the falling, skull-charred bodies. That had been her biggest concern at this step.
Projectile weapons had been chosen for this post because the cartridges were noisy when they exploded, and that would have alerted the people inside to her attack. Knowing in advance that the raiders themselves had accidentally damaged the surveillance system for this building was a bonus. It allowed her to step into the foyer without hesitation. Foreknowledge also had her choosing the correct emergency stairwell, the one the invaders hadn’t booby-trapped.
It was, however, barricaded. Someone had tapped into the building’s security measures and activated the force fields built into each doorway. They were meant to slow any intruder trying to break in and make off with any sensitive information. Since it was impossible for her to logically know the pass code without revealing how—though she could have just checked in the timestreams—Ia simply put up her hand to the doorway and leaned on the near-invisible barrier. Leaned, with both body and mind.
Static crackled into her palm. Up the bones of her arm. Down into her stomach, where it coiled and burned. The field shorted out. Ia ducked through and bounded up the stairs. This building was the structure where the critical research information was being stored for Oberon’s military contracts. In specific, the contracts covering the composition of the focusing crystals for Terran laser weaponry, and in very specific, the hottest, hardest-hitting starship cannon crystals available.
Several years from now, she would need what this company was striving to create. She didn’t dare let it fall into the hands of criminal masterminds. This seemingly simple mining company was on the edge of a major breakthrough in refraction materials science. If she hadn’t been assigned to Ferrar’s Company in specific, she would have had to manipulate events to affect the outcome here anyway. Having the Grandmaster of the Afaso meddle so effectively in her initial career path had saved her a lot of stress and worry.
Mindful of the Marines rushing toward this building, she finished the last two flights at a full run, unfastening her wrist unit. Slapping her empty hand on the field surface, she drained it to the point of collapse as well, and touched the controls to open the door panel. Then flung up her hands in a “surrender” pose as the quartet of gunmen on the other side aimed their weapons straight at her chest and head. She didn’t move. Neither did they.
“Who the frag are
you
?” one of them demanded. He was wielding a laser rifle instead of a projectile weapon, but his rifle looked like it had been ripped off of a full-mechsuit, or maybe a small armored vehicle. He was also quite muscular, almost as much as her half-twin, Thorne. Ia didn’t let the comparison rattle her.

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