Her Brother's Keeper - eARC Page 13
Dr. Loren’s eyes, despite being on a small screen, seemed to bore right into Cecil and Zak, judging them, damning them, pleading with them. “If you’re watching this, and you understand what I’m saying, I implore you: these artifacts are priceless. Please treat them with respect. Humanity itself may one day share the same fate. Perhaps one day soon.”
The archaeologist trailed off, then addressed the camera one last time. “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” The video ended then, leaving Cecil with a knot in his stomach.
Chapter 12
New Austin
Lone Star System
30 km north of Aterrizaje, Capital District
Southern Hemisphere
“Contact right!” Marcus shouted, directing his team’s attention to the quartet of hostiles at their three o’clock position. “Thirty meters!” He ducked behind a crumbling wall as the enemy’s weapons opened up. Leaning from behind cover, he selected the underslung 30mm grenade launcher bolted to his carbine, found a target, and fired. “Grenade out!” An instant later, the smart grenade air-burst inside the window that two of the hostiles were firing from. Their silhouettes disappeared in a cloud of smoke and dust. “Covering fire!”
“Engaging!” shouted Hondo, who was equipped with a heavy automatic rifle. He poured bursts of fire onto the position of the two remaining enemy, keeping their heads down as Devree, the team sniper, lined up a shot with her powerful rifle. She fired in rapid succession, taking three shots to punch through a wall and tag one of the hostiles. Hondo’s machine gun chewed through the wall the other was hiding behind, and the rest of the team poured the fire on.
“Halifax! Tanaka! Wade! On me!” Marcus took three of his shooters and assaulted forward, pushing through the ambush to counterattack. They rounded a burnt-out building and were able to flank their remaining enemies, cutting them down in a matter of seconds. The team formed up once more, entered, and cleared the building they had taken fire from. Marcus was impressed with how smoothly the whole thing went this time. “Clear!” Marcus shouted. His team responded similarly, letting him know the entire building was secure. “Good job. Check for injuries, form back up, and let’s keep moving.”
An alarm buzzed loudly. “Cease fire, cease fire, cease fire,” came over the team’s headsets. “End-ex. Put ’em on safe and let ’em hang.” Marcus and his team exited the building, dusting themselves off, weapons lowered. The seven hired guns were covered in dirt and sweat. Their body armor chafed, despite the latest and best active comfort enhancements.
“Damn it,” Marcus swore. He had managed to tear open the crotch of his trousers when diving to cover.
Devree approached, removing the magazine from her large sniper rifle as she did so. She whistled when she saw the hole in her team leader’s pants.
“Hey, my eyes are up here,” Marcus said with a grin. “This happens every time. I guess my massive cock can’t be contained by ordinary pants.”
Wade patted his long-time partner on the shoulder as he walked up. “That’s not what Ellie told me.”
Devree said “oooooh!” theatrically as Marcus laughed. The former marshal turned to Wade. “Yeah well, you don’t have to worry about impressing your lovebot, do you?”
The sniper’s cold blue eyes lit up as she grinned evilly at Wade. “You have a lovebot?”
Wade’s face turned red. “No!”
“It’s more of a sexbot,” Marcus said. “I don’t think there’s anything loving about what he does to that thing.”
“Lies! Lies and slander!” Wade protested.
Marcus chuckled as the dark-haired sniper made his partner blush like a schoolboy. He was pleased with how well his team was getting along, even though they’d only been training together for a matter of days. He’d made it a point to get to know each of them individually, and encouraged them to go out together, as a team, after the day’s training was finished. Getting drunk together often improved team integrity as well as training together.
Captain Blackwood’s recruiting effort had produced a pretty decent team, Marcus thought. Devree Starlighter was a former law enforcement sharpshooter from the Concordiat Inner Colony world of Mandalay. Even with her extensive cybernetic prosthetics, she was beautiful. During the interview with Marcus and Mazer Broadbent, she described in grim detail how she’d ended up so far away on New Austin, escaping the hitmen of a powerful crime syndicate that murdered her partner and nearly killed her as well.
Jeremiah Hondo had been a grunt in the Espatier Corps, and had seen a little combat on a couple of short contingency deployments. He’d been out of the military for over a decade, but had impressed Marcus with how motivated he was and how fit he’d kept himself. He was a lean, muscular man of Earth-African descent. His dark skin was covered in ornate tattoos that traced his family and tribal heritage back more than fifteen hundred years, prior to the dawn of the Space Age on Earth. He’d spent his time on New Austin raising six children, managing a herd of cattle, and brewing his own beer.
Randall Markgraf had been a noncommissioned officer in the Concordiat Defense Force. He was a military intelligence interrogator by trade, and Marcus thought his particular skill set would be very useful once they got on the ground on Zanzibar. He was a veteran of the counterinsurgency effort on the troubled colony world of New Caledonia. He was still forbidden to discuss the details of his work in that conflict, but his résumé and service record all checked out. Like Marcus, he’d emigrated to New Austin on his discharge bonus, and had been making a living as a private investigator in Aterrizaje. Captain Blackwood’s offer was considerably more than he made in an average year, however, so he jumped at the opportunity.
Ken Tanaka hailed from Nippon, the Concordiat colony known for being home to the largest number of ethnic and cultural Japanese in known space. He had been on a prestigious law enforcement tactical team that was a first tier asset for the colonial government. He resigned after an incident resulted in an innocent being killed during a shootout with an infamous, bloodthirsty crime syndicate. After studying the reports and listening to Ken’s description of events, Marcus concluded that the former policeman had been a scapegoat for politicized administrators, and was the victim of people who hadn’t been there second-guessing a split-second, life-or-death decision. In the Espatier Corps, Ken wouldn’t have been punished for what happened. But Nippon was Nippon, and they did things their own way there. In any case, the quiet Nipponese expatriate was more than competent and stereotypically stoic. Marcus hired him without hesitation.
The last addition to the team was Benjamin Halifax. He was a short, broad man with a muscular body and a hard gleam in his eye. His pale, freckled head was shaved, except for a strip of red hair down the middle, and a scraggly red beard hung from his chin. He didn’t have a record of military service like most of his teammates. Instead, he’d spent several years as a mercenary, serving in several small, bloody conflicts on independent worlds. More importantly, he was the only man qualified for the job who had actually been to Zanzibar recently. Given that much of the information available to Marcus was patchy at best and possibly years out of date, having a guy who actually knew his way around their destination could be immensely helpful. That made it worth bringing him on board, despite his sketchy background.
A few moments later, a pair of instructors approached the team of mercenaries with Captain Blackwood in tow. They wore high-visibility red armor vests and ball caps, and carried holstered sidearms. The two men were employees of the Aterrizaje Tactical Institute, the most prestigious (and only) advanced weapons training facility on New Austin. They had been observing the live-fire exercise remotely, controlling the enemy combatant bots and monitoring the students for safety.
“Very nicely done,” the lead instructor said, greeting the team. “You’ve only been training with us for eight days, and you’re working together like professionals. A couple of you got hit in the close ambush, but the sim says that none of y
ou would’ve died from your wounds.”
“I caught one in the ass,” Halifax said. “I’ll be sitting on a cushion for a few days.” The target bots carried lifelike representations of enemy personnel, and could fire at students with what was colloquially known as “stinger” rounds: low velocity, non-lethal projectiles that didn’t cause any serious harm, but hurt like being stabbed with a hot blade.
“We saw that,” the instructor said with a chuckle. “Mr. Tanaka got his arm clipped, too. Nonetheless, you assaulted through, outflanked your opponents, cleared that structure, and prevailed. We’ll go over some learning points on the replay, but all in all you did very well.”
“I found the whole thing to be most impressive,” the captain mused. “Marcus, I think you chose your team well.”
Marcus was pleased that the captain seemed satisfied. Taking seven people through the advanced combat tactics course at ATI, after purchasing the necessary weapons, equipment, and ammunition, was not inexpensive. He wanted to make sure the captain knew she was getting her money’s worth. He didn’t know what they would encounter on Zanzibar, but he found himself increasingly confident that his hastily formed team could handle anything thrown at them.
The instructors were pleased as well. “Excellent work today. You passed your final exercise with flying colors. Tomorrow we’ll go over the lessons learned as a group and sign off on your certifications.”
Marcus grinned. This was better training than the Marshals Service ever paid for, and damned if it wasn’t fun. His team seemed to be enjoying themselves, too. It’d be less enjoyable once real bullets started flying, but until then, he wasn’t going to be a wet blanket. It was bad for morale. “It’s early still,” he told his assembled team. “Let’s meet up in a couple hours for dinner and drinks. You all did a damned fine job today, and we ought to celebrate.”
* * *
In his career in the Concordiat Espatier Corps, Marcus had been hauled across space in many different ships, most of them military troop transports. He’d never served on a small patrol ship like the Andromeda, as they typically didn’t perform the sort of missions that required a complement of Espatiers.
She was a Polaris Class patrol ship from Winchell-Chung Astronautical Industries, and she was big for her class. Standing seventy meters tall on her landing jacks, she outmassed most ships designed for her mission by quite a bit. She also was capable of longer duration patrols than most ships of her type.
Her hull was thick and cylindrical, coming to a blunt nose at the tip. Around the base of the hull were four conformal engine nacelles which housed her primary rocket motors. Four stubby airfoils protruded from the hull, in between the engine nacelles. As Captain Blackwood had explained, the bottom half of the ship was almost all propellant tankage, surrounding the thermonuclear motor which powered her. Near the nose was a cockpit, much like you’d see on a conventional aircraft. When the ship was planeted, the pilot’s back was to the ground, but when she was in flight he was facing forward. Many of the smaller, transatmospheric ships featured this archaic arrangement. It wasn’t necessary—the pilot didn’t fly the ship by eye, and in fact the Andromeda could be controlled from several different stations—but it was tradition going back to the dawn of spaceflight.
Docked on a launchpad at the Capitol Starport, the Andromeda had been serviced, refueled, and rearmed for the long haul to Zanzibar. Patrol ships of this class weren’t generally designed to be away from their home station for more than a couple of months. The planned round trip to Zanzibar and back would take much longer. Even with the Andromeda’s long legs, they were going to need to tank up on propellant more than once during the journey.
Marcus, Wade, and their team made their way up the large mechanical gangway which connected the landing tower to the ship’s open cargo bay. The cargo hold itself was the largest single compartment on the ship, aside from the propellant tanks. It took up the entire diameter of the ship, and was more than twice as tall as most decks.
Inside, the ship’s cargomaster, a man named Kimball, greeted Marcus and his associates. “Good afternoon, gentlefolk,” he said with a smile. Kimball was short by normal human standards, standing only 1.3 meters tall, and had curly hair and a trimmed goatee. He hailed from the world of Darwin, a Concordiat Inner Colony that was first colonized in the Mid-Diaspora period. The huge, dense planet had almost half again as much gravity as the Earth. The early colonists engaged in genetic modification treatments to help their descendants adapt to the high gravity. Centuries later, most Darwinites were extremely short, but possessed dense muscles and strong bones. “How went the controlled violence today?”
“It went well,” Wade replied. “We completed our final exercise today. How are things going here?”
“All is in order,” Kimball said. “We’ve stocked the necessary provisions for the journey. We’re on schedule to lift off in four local days.”
“Very good,” Marcus said with a nod. “We’re headed back to our racks to get cleaned up, change, and then we’re going out for the evening.” It was not only polite, but long standing tradition, to let the ship’s crew know of your comings and goings.
“Most excellent,” Kimball beamed. He wasn’t really looking at Marcus, so much as he was focused on his eyepiece, but he was paying attention. “I’ll let the watch officer know of your plans, for the log. We’re still connected to the Starport’s water supply, so there are no time limits on showers. Water is included in our berthing fee.”
Marcus nodded and headed toward the crew quarters. Water was a precious, limited resource in deep space. Once underway, showers were allowed only with the bare minimum amount of (recycled) water necessary to do the job. Even still, he didn’t want his team to hog the Andromeda’s limited shower space. The ship’s crew only got to enjoy that kind of luxury every so often.
The crew quarters were located just below the cargo bay. It, too, was a taller-than-normal deck, as it accommodated two levels of individual bunks. Each bunk was a small compartment, 2.5 by 1.25 by 1.5 meters in size, containing acceleration-adaptive bedding, a power source, and an onboard computer. They were, mercifully, soundproofed to give the occupants about the only privacy they’d get while underway. During their orientation, it had been explained to the mercenaries that each berth could also function as an emergency survival pod. If the crew compartment were to depressurize, the compartments would seal air-tight. Onboard CO2 scrubbers would allow a crewmember to survive for a lot longer than he would in just a spacesuit. Ships in the Andromeda’s mass class rarely came equipped with escape pods, so this was about as good as it was going to get. Marcus didn’t mind; it was better protection than he’d had on some of the big troop transports he’d ridden.
Two levels of berths ringed the crew compartment, fifteen in each layer. They were separated by sections of life-support equipment, compartments for storage of personal effects, and structural supports. The top level was offset slightly from the bottom one, and could be accessed by a narrow catwalk when the ship was under gravity. In the center of the crew compartment was a commons area and recreational center, complete with screens, games, a zero-g-capable kitchenette, and seating. The commons was deserted presently, as most of the crewmembers who weren’t on watch were off ship, enjoying their last few days of planetside leave.
A latrine and shower room was adjacent to the crew deck. While each berth had its own relief tube, the regular zero-g-capable toilets were much less awkward to use. The showers, likewise, were designed to work in freefall, though they functioned just fine when the ship was planeted. Marcus’ brief, hot shower was nonetheless glorious after a day of running around in full battle rattle under the blazing light and heat of Lone Star.
Chapter 13
New Austin
Lone Star System
Aterrizaje, Capital District
Southern Hemisphere
The Aterrizaje Stampede was a big event, spanning six days and dozens of events. It was as close as New Austin came to h
aving its own Olympic Games, and this year was its biggest showing yet. The whole thing had been a whirlwind, and Annie found herself in awe of the spectacle. At its peak, there were fifty thousand people in attendance at the fairgrounds, and countless more watching the media coverage. It was positively overwhelming for a simple country girl from the outback, but Annie was holding her own. She was enjoying the freedom of being away from her parents, but at the same time found herself wishing they could be there too. Her mom was busy opening a new mining claim, trying to get it up and running while she could still travel comfortably. Her dad was off playing soldier somewhere in the city. Both of them called her every night.
In any case Annie wasn’t lacking for company. Carlos had made good on his offer to show her around the city, and she’d visited her friends from school as well. Aterrizaje was a small but rapidly growing city of a quarter million people. It could be tough to navigate sometimes, but between the mass transit system and the autotaxis, getting where you needed to go wasn’t too difficult. There was a lot to see and do, even outside of the rodeo. Annie’s event wasn’t until the final day, so until then she was free to explore. There was one place in the city she really wanted to see, though.
“Here we are,” Carlos said, stopping his father’s automobile in an otherwise empty parking lot. “The northwest viewing area of the spaceport. Why did you want to come here?”
Annie didn’t answer. She hopped out of the vehicle, closing the door behind her, and looked longingly to the south through a high, chain-link fence. As the sun sank toward the horizon, a dozen ships of various shapes and sizes were silhouetted against the fiery red sky and golden clouds. “There,” she said, pointing at one of them. “That one off to the left? That’s the Andromeda.”