An unseen appendage locked onto my left leg and began clamping down. I could feel the damage, but my body had automatically dialed back the pain receptors. Pain was a notification system, and I had bigger worries right now. I was badly outmatched and outgunned, but strangely, I got the impression the man or robot was toying with me. I was relatively sure it could have ripped me in half, even with my body armor. This thing was a beast. Dodging the metal arm again, I didn’t notice the bullhorn shaped device now peering over the shoulder until it fired, and my world instantly went black.

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-SIX

  Xero wanted to contact her friend Valyn. The mere fact that she did pissed her off. Her entire being was founded around the concept of independence or needing no one. She was a proud introvert with a disdain for asking for help no matter how great the need. Much of her identity was crafted around her own self-sufficiency, and she feared even the tiniest of fractures could unravel it completely. A therapist had once described her as suffering from imposter syndrome.

  “She was a fool,” Xero said to no one.

  “Hey.”

  Xero fought to control her surprise from the voice coming up behind her.

  “Hello, Hauk.”

  Jordan looked over her shoulder as she worked on the small black object held under the bright light. The multi-faceted side sparkled in the light like a cold fire.

  “What’s that?”

  He pointed, then realized she was wearing VR goggles and wouldn’t have seen his hand. “… that you’re working on?”

  Xero smiled; she enjoyed his nervousness around her. She wasn’t immune to his obvious attraction, but she’d learned to control those urges long ago. Okay, some of them. Besides, the man seemed permanently preoccupied. She wasn’t unsure if that involved his feeling for someone else or just how the military man was wired. Either way, she didn’t think it wise to follow Kovach’s recommendation. Not yet at least.

  “A special project.” She moved the object from the clamp and held it out to the captain. “Ever seen one?”

  He held it up briefly before passing it back and shaking his head. “Nah. Heavy, but doesn’t feel natural.”

  “It’s not, it’s a tightly compressed, artificial, crystal carbon base, but not a straight, crystalline lattice-like diamond. Something else entirely.”

  “Look,” he said passing it back. “The LT said you and the Marine engineer were working on something. Is this part of it?”

  Xero shook her head with a smile, “No, Captain, this is just a distraction for me.” She rose and motioned for him to follow. They entered a metal corridor that he thought must run next to the engineering section. “Captain, how familiar are you with starship propulsion systems?”

  He looked a little baffled. “Essentially not at all.”

  “That’s okay. Honestly, I wasn’t either. But Specialist Otero has been very helpful in bringing me up to speed despite her hesitancy in revealing classified intel to a civilian. But these are challenging times.”

  He nodded agreement.

  “We are currently running the ship in maintenance mode. That is to limit our power output and frankly, because the spy ship out there would expect us to do it.”

  “You think they have that level of monitoring over our situation?”

  “I believe whoever is out there can see or hear almost everything going on onboard this ship. Except down here, next to the reactor’s core. The shielding is too thick, and we have continuously swept the area for sensors.”

  Hauk considered that as Xero undogged a hatch and entered, holding it open for him. He saw Otero and one of the Banshee team working on something.

  “So, here is your attack plan?”

  Xero smiled and said, “No, you are my attack plan.”

  An hour later, Jordan Hauk leaned against the bulkhead in disbelief. Xero, Halo, and the Marine Space Engineer had gone over it multiple times, but he still wasn’t buying that it was even remotely possible.

  “Who would be stupid enough to do something like this?”

  Otero grinned. “We have just the guy.” She touched an icon on her sleeve computer and spoke into it. Minutes later, the biggest Marine Hauk had ever seen emerged from the hatchway. “Holy shit!”

  “Captain, meet your space assaulter, Corporal Koog.”

  “Koog, really?” Hauk said, watching his own hand disappear into the meaty paw of the Marine.

  “It’s short for Coughlan, or something,” Otero said. “Point is, Koog will carry the IED.”

  “And all we have to do is get him onto target. But why me?” Hauk asked.

  Xero flipped up a holodisplay nearby and entered a command line sequence that brought up a schematic layout of the entire ship. Hauk could see the numerous colored dots moving around and many that seemed stationary. As she hovered the cursor over each of the dots, an ID popped up on the screen.

  “Personnel manifest,” Hauk stated.

  “Yes, but this isn’t ours. Banshee essentially hijacked this ship, they didn’t go through any of the normal procedures. I thought the AI may have done it, but the code isn’t right for that. No, this is an ugly bootleg hack that was remotely installed along with the other command blocks.” She handed him the control. “Tell me what you see.”

  He accessed as many of the IDs as he could but quickly understood what she was getting at.

  “Red-7 isn’t showing up, none of us.”

  “Neither are the rescued Space Marines. Apparently, they didn’t think we would add to our ranks or simply haven’t thought to do an updated scan. They have us locked down, so why should they worry too much about who’s aboard?”

  “So, Koog and I can go for a little spacewalk unnoticed while the rest of you would show up immediately.”

  “You? Not one of your men?”

  Hauk nodded. “This is my responsibility. I’m also the only one who successfully went through SWTS, Space Warfare Tactical School. Plus, according to this, I am invisible.”

  “Essentially,” she agreed. “Although, I don’t show up either,” Xero added. “However, planting actual bombs isn’t my specialty.”

  “Corporal, are you up for this?” Hauk asked. “Because I have never done a real spacewalk in my life. I have no idea what to do if anything goes wrong, and hell, I may just pass out the moment we step out through the stasis field.”

  “Oh, hell yeah, sir,” the Marine said. “I can’t fucking wait. And you’ll be fine, I’ve taken a lot of newbies out into dead space before.”

  Halo slapped the big guy on his back. “I love this fucking guy. Don’t die out there, okay?”

  Hauk shook his head. This wasn’t what he wanted to be doing, especially since talking with Kovach, but this was the deal he’d made with Riggs. Help them free this ship, and she would give him and his men a ride home. “So, when do we go?”

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-SEVEN

  “Y’all are out of your mind!”

  “Bishop, you don’t know the half of it. These crazy bastards are just going to step out of a starship moving…” he checked the flexible display on his sleeve, “let’s call it 18,000 miles an hour and watch as we sail on out of sight.”

  “Yeah, Spacers don’t know shit. It doesn’t work that way,” Koog said, pulling on the upper portion of his Marine Recon Patrol space suit. “We will keep traveling the same course and speed as this ship unless we make a trajectory change.”

  “Which you will have to do in order to get to where the enemy’s stealth ship is,” Bishop said, as if justifying his original point.

  “Look, we know it’s a bit crazy, but hell, we’ve actually trained for stupid shit like this. Me and the captain go out, circle the planet a few times while slowly drifting into the path of the other vessel. Our suits have a zero-radar profile. We won’t show up on any sensors.”

  “Not even ours,” Bayou said, just walking into the nearly empty hangar bay. “Corporal Koog, you are our stealth bomber. Captain Hauk, you are overwatch and targeting. He’s going to be nearly blind maneuvering the weapon.”

  Hauk eyed the long, black, angry looking device. It was an ugly piece of ordinance that he never wanted to be standing this close to.

  “I-8 Penetrator with isometric warheads,” Halo said with pride. It had taken him and Otero’s crew days to wrestle it out of its launch cradle without setting off the ship’s alarms systems, wrestle its 1500-pound dead weight to the work bay under the propulsion engines, and reconfigure the missile for manual deployment and remote detonation.

  The Penetrator was an old-school type of weapon relying on brute force. Upon detonation, it would send a superheated slug of copper through whatever was in close proximity. The shaped charge device could be programed for multiple targets on explosion. But if used singularly, such as the hull of an enemy ship, it theoretically could punch through up to a foot of armor plating before igniting a fireball that should consume whatever was on the other side with devastating effectiveness. The technology was a generation old and based on the EFP, or explosively formed penetrator devices. What made them so lethal was they literally turned your ballistic protection into energy.

  “How close will it need to be?” Bayou asked.

  Halo looked at Koog for an answer. “Very. Range is very limited. Under propulsion, it would detonate on contact. Not good for a proximity mine. Specialist Otero added a magnetic locking device. It will self-arm once it connects with the enemy ship. Then, the captain just has to send the signal. Please wait until I am anywhere but there before you do that, sir.”

  “Roger that, Koog,” the captain said.

  “Where on the ship should it go?” Bayou asked, knowing the team had been going over these details for days.

  “Anywhere, really,” Halo answered. “Since we have no idea what configuration the other ship is, we are just going to decide based on approach and situational awareness. Ideally, engine compartment or the bridge, but on some ships the command deck is in the center deck of the ship, so that may be sub-optimal. Koog will have a better sense of where it should go. Trust him.”

  Riggs couldn’t get past the fact that this was literally like commanding an old-school aircraft carrier and tossing two sailors overboard with a torpedo to destroy a sub that may or may not even be out there. “Okay, guys, you have the extra oxygen tanks. You will be out there a while, don’t get disoriented and don’t lose track of the target. You must slow drift into the spot. If they spot you, they will assume it is just more space debris because, believe me, the shit is everywhere right now.”

  “What if we get hit by some of that debris?” Hauk asked. That was a concern he hadn’t even known to have until now.

  “It won’t matter, brother,” Halo said, handing him his helmet. “It will be over before you realize you were in danger.”

  Bayou waited for the crew to do final checks on both men and the bomb. She saluted both of them before returning to the bridge. Ten minutes later, an inner air lock hatch opened, although her systems board did not show that. Likewise, when the chamber cycled, and the outer door opened. Mission TDF-1 was a go. “Yep, they die first.”

  “It’s a stupid plan, Riggs,” Halo said, reactivating the safety on the airlock.

  “Prowler’s Ninth Rule of Battle,” she said with a laugh.

  “If it’s stupid, but it works, it wasn’t stupid,” they said nearly in unison.

  Riggs turned back to the opening gate. Nothing kept them from the cold of space but a nearly invisible field of charged electrons. The stasis field generator was another of those miracle inventions that no one seemed to fully understand, yet they trusted it with their lives every day. Now, she was sending two men out there, probably to their deaths. She pushed the thought aside, she’d made the decision, it was happening. “Good hunting.”

  Hauk and Koog moved the massive weapon to the opening on it’s wheeled trolly. Bayou and the others moved back past the yellow line on the floor indicating where the backup field would automatically generate. She watched as both men stepped out into the darkness.

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-EIGHT

  The restraints were surprisingly effective; I wasn’t sure what it took to actually secure me, but someone seemed to. The Decimator that hit me had not chosen to kill me. That was an important detail. Didn’t seem that useful at the moment, so I filed it away for later. Basic assessment told me little. No serious injuries, damage to my leg was already healing, but I had no immediate way to free myself. I opened my eyes and scanned the room.

  Despite my systems heightened spatial awareness. This was not at all what I was expecting; the room was large and ornate. Dark, heavy beams lined a ceiling high overhead. My prison seemed unnecessarily spacious, ornate, and old. Everything, including the smell, was old.

  “Update,” I subvocalized.

  My AI seemed distracted, which did little to put me at ease.

  “Residence,” she stated matter-of-factly. “The compound is approximately the target locations Ms. Voss supplied.”

  Yep, her tone was all but icy, which had to be deliberate. She was assuming Voss had intentionally lured me into a trap. That wasn’t a totally unreasonable assumption, but I was avoiding making that leap.

  “Where is Voss and Sumo?”

  “Voss is unknown, Sumo was not captured, but his beacon has been motionless for the last three hours.”

  “Injured?”

  “Nothing that is showing on his telemetry,” Ada responded.

  I pulled against the restraints again. They seemed to give but almost immediately stiffen and tighten even more. The more I struggled, the tighter my bindings became. I relaxed and paid attention to what else she was saying.

  “One individual so far, your eyes were not open enough to make a positive ID.” The image showed a man walking toward me; he was tall and lean and almost glided when he walked.

  “That’s not Nevis?”

  “No.” Ada paused deliberately. “I’m sorry, Joe, I don’t think I helped you manage the fight very well. We shouldn’t have been captured. Not that easily.”

  My AI and I had a disagreement on what was ‘easy,’ but I got her point. Despite our capabilities, we had been rather ineffective so far. The upgrades had either not been totally on point, or something was off.

  “It’s okay, Ada. We’re exactly where we wanted to be. Now, we just have to complete the mission.”

  “You are well out of your lane, Gunny,” the tall man said, moving closer to the table I was strapped to.

  He spoke with an accent that my system placed as Central American, although his appearance was more European. Truthfully, he had such a forgettable appearance he could have gone unnotched nearly anywhere. That, plus the fact Ada could find no record of him, scared me. He also misread my chevrons and rockers emblem stenciled on my chest plate. The screaming eagle in the middle identified me as Space Force, not a traditional master gunnery sergeant. No one who knew anything about the service would ever call me Gunny.

  “Got lost,” I replied.

  The man gave the briefest of smiles; it looked like an unwelcome visitor on his dead face. My head was strapped down tight; I’d guessed that some of my battle suit was removed, although he would have needed an armorer’s key to get the full rig off.

  “Gunny, you are of no interest to me. You obviously were hired protection for the woman. Who is she?”

  The man moved with a silent grace that let me know he was a killer. Still, he’d made assumptions about me that were incorrect, and that mistake might prove fatal.

  “I don’t recall a woman, but if you find my dog, he needs to be fed. He’s particularly fond of assholes, so he should be fine with you.”

  “Our own ‘pets’ will deal with them both,” he said slowly, while he focused on something just out of my line of sight. “I am curious, though. How have you survived out there since the Liberty Strike?”

  “Liberty Strike? You mean all the shit of Last Day?”

  I saw now the knife he was holding; it was menacing, and it was mine. He’d found the release on my suit, slid the Heidelberg Damascus blade out, and was getting the feel of its balance and weight as anyone familiar with knife work would.

  “You have your name for the cleansing, we have ours.”

  “So, you were responsible for killing half the planet?”

  “Me?” He actually did laugh then. “No, no, I am but a lowly errand boy for them. I provide a service, nothing more.”

  In my peripheral vision I saw him working the nearly hidden controls to activate the vibrosonic blade. I knew he’d gotten it right when his grip on the handle changed. The special combat knife blade now vibrated at an almost imperceptible speed. It was on a level so microscopic that you could look at it and not see any movement. The person holding it could feel a very slight hum that tended to reveal itself as an itch in the palm of your hand unless you gripped it tightly. In this mode, it would also slice through nearly anything in microseconds up to and including human bone.

  “Very nice, Sergeant, truly a special weapon. You won’t mind if I hang on to it will you? I assure you that you will be having no further use of it.”

  “Well, asshole, since you put it like that, yeah. I really want you to have it.”

  “Ada, give me something to get me free of these restraints. I need to kick this bastard’s ass.”

  She responded to my subvocalized commands instantly. “The material seems remarkably similar to the thunder vines that are so prevalent now. Although, I am not sensing any toxins entering your system. Still, each time you struggle the elastomer properties seem to constrict even more.”

  I wasn’t in the mood for an alien biology lesson. I just wanted to be free.

  “So, errand boy. What are we doing here? Is Maine an armed camp now? Your rich masters have trained Warbot guard dogs?”