Swims and Davis find One-Ton in engineering, testing the connections between the impellers and the stabilizers he and Semo beat back into place. The shipboy's there as well; he looks up from a half-covered access pit in the deck when the shipmaster and spook enter.
"Any news from the world?" One-Ton asks.
---
Max sees the bedlam laid out before him and sprints for the mob. Someone must've seen the portal go up and led some sort of half-assed charge. The drones would have cut them down, which must have sparked some sort of riot. Beam pulses whip up into the ceiling, showering debris and sparks across the roiling crowd. Of the full Quad Max counted earlier, he sees maybe four still standing, holding their own. He just plain doesn't see the others. The floor is slick with blood as he nears the Gate. The ghostly holographics are gone, their projectors smashed by stray fire. Bodies litter the ground. The mob seems content to form a sort of angry wall around the Gate. Too many bystanders have been cut down for the people to continue trying to test the Turai that remain. Max has reached the outer edge of the wall of people. He's wearing Kansatai armor, which precludes him from blending in with or pushing through the mob. Max has decided that getting to the Gate is more important than winning hearts and minds when a squat armored man crashes into his side!
"YOU!" Samal Vinyup shouts as he barrels into Max. Both men go down but neither gets an advantage.
"You're going to pay for this!" Vinyup screams, his voice clear even through the vox-blocked helmet feed. He stabs his sword up towards Max's stomach, but the scientist slams his rifle butt into Vinyup's forearm, ruining the blow. The sharp blade skitters off Max's breastplate. Vinyup grabs the beamer shroud with his free hand, so Max pulls Taylor's SCAR-H around and plants the barrel on the Imperial officer's chest. Vinyup falls back, blood geysering from the hole punched through his armor. Max uses the pause to move his barrel up right under Vinyup's chin. A second gunshot silences the Samal.
Max shakily gets to his feet to find he's gotten the mob's attention. The portal shimmers not 30 feet away. The attack drones between mob and Gate whiirr as they reconfigure their attack matrices. There are no longer any Turai standing between Max and the portal.
A hail of stinger fire shreds everything within inches of Max. The drones have targeted him but their IFF keeps Max alive a moment longer. Just then, the green-marked drone glyphs in Max's HUD blink orange, then red. Someone's removed Max's suit IFF.
Max runs. He lets the empty SCAR dangle from its sling, reaching instead for his computer and slamming armored fingers across the sequence that should activate his homebrewed IFF jammer. His shoulder plating's ripped away by a stream of slivers that stops short of decapitating him just as he reaches the portal. The other side has a few wounded and dead civilians lying in what looks like another Gateport. City lights illuminate the workmanlike setting, and most importantly Max doesn't see a single Turai on the far portal.
He welcomes the disorientation and nausea, crashing to his knees in the Temple City Space Elevator and Gate Complex. His shoulder's raw and bleeding but he'll live.
Made it, Max thinks. Got to dial somewhere else, hop there, maybe twice, then get to Ear-
They come at him not from the portal, but from behind the portal, using the peculiar properties of the Gateway's one-way matter/two-way energy barrier to take Max by surprise. A blade slices into Max's undersuit but stops before it tears organs. Max isn't so lucky with the second attacker - his strike plunges into Max's back, sending Max to the deck.
Max's vision hazes with pain, but he makes out four Turai. The two who ambushed him from behind the portal look rather battered from their escape through their own Gateway. The other two hang back, beamers drawn, clearly native to Sambasan.
Sambasan's own Control Room aborts their portal, which winks out with a brief flash. It must be the middle of the night on Sambasan - the handful of Gate travelers are quickly making for the exits.
"Surrender or face pacification!" one of the Sambasanian Turai orders.
"Save it!" barks a bloodied, quivering Turai. "I'm gonna take pleasure in gutting you, boy," he hisses at Max.
Max replies by gritting his teeth and swinging his rifle butt into the cheeky Turai's face! There's a crack and the soldier falls back, stunned for a few crucial seconds. His Aikoran compatriot swings at Max as the scientist kicks free and gets to his feet but the blade only catches air. The two Sambasanian Turai click away, look at their weapons in confusion, then draw their own swords and give chase.
"Yeah, and it's not good. Max ran off with the sled, and odds are, he's doing something really dumb right now that's going to turn up the heat to a degree we can't deal with." Davis braces himself. "We're going to verify that first, but the odds are that we're going to have to destroy the Morningstar as a decoy to get the Imperials off our tail. We're wiring her up for remote control, and we need your help, One-Ton. You know more about this ship than anyone else. It sucks, but there it is."
"Boss, you're on board with this?" One-Ton looks like he's about to either cry, go after Davis with a fusion cutter, or both.
"They have said they will get us a new ship, and I believe them," Swims says. "I believe them when they say they can bring low the Imperium. You believed them too, long before this, when you refused to fire the cruise engines outside Botane."
"They weren't tellin' me to vape my ship back then!" One-Tone growls. "You might as well be askin' me to kill my own kid. Not to mention the General's all that poor boy's got left of 'is dad," One-Ton says, waving a shaky hand at the shipboy. "I ain't seen nothin' from these Homeworlders that tells me they can beat the Imperium. I seen plenty says they can kill whole bunches of Turai, sure. They've all pulled miracles out their ass, I know I owe Stanhill my life for one. But they're not takin' down the Cortex. Get out of my engine bay."
"You're right, we can't do it by ourselves. But now we're hooked up with the Bashakrans, and they've been getting intel and fighting the Imperials for a long time now. They've got contacts in places we've never even heard of, and together, we stand a chance of raiding the Cortex. But we can't do it with all this heat on us. The Morningstar, or the Akamu, or whatever we change its name to next has been permanently marked on the Imperial network, and after fuck-up at Jang-xur, I doubt we'll do any better in the shadowports. There's nowhere for her to go that's safe, One-Ton. The only option left is to let her go out in a blaze of glory and give all of us a second chance," Davis says. "We need you for this, One-Ton, and the kid. Not just for this job, but after we get off this rock and into another ship. I know it won't be the same as the Akamu, but hopefully we'll live long enough to find something that comes close."
"I'll be thinkin' on what your people are gonna get for me while I wire 'er up," One-Ton growls. "Get your shit and git off the General. I need the weight where it's gonna be for the flight."
"Boss," One-Ton adds, "I hope we picked the right team."
"So do I," Swims agrees. "Let's get everyone moved to the flitcraft, Davis. There is work to be done."
Max replies by gritting his teeth and swinging his rifle butt into the cheeky Turai's face! There's a crack and the soldier falls back, stunned for a few crucial seconds. His Aikoran compatriot swings at Max as the scientist kicks free and gets to his feet but the blade only catches air. The two Sambasanian Turai click away, look at their weapons in confusion, then draw their own swords and give chase.
Max ditches the spent Stinger, slinging his SCAR and pulls a grenade off his tactical harness.
"I doubt they expect me to this!" says Max to himself, pulling the grenade pin and lets it cook for a second before dropping it in his wake.
The Turai ignore the dropped stinger as they chase Max through wide, sweeping corridors advertising exotic travel destinations and marketing unfamiliar foods. The glitz is disorienting, but Max knows what he's looking for as he cooks off one of his frags and leaves it in his wake just like the empty stinger.
BOOM! Max's helmet baffles muffle the explosion. He chances a quick look behind him. He only counts two Turai on his tail now; one's not keeping pace with his partner but he is frantically stripping components from his beam rifle. His partner, one of the Aikorans, pours on the speed and comes within ten feet of Max. The foot chase skids around a boarding scanner and attendant drone and bursts out into a promenade. Bystanders have taken cover under flimsy tables and plastiformed seats. The Sambasan Temple City skyline illuminates the midnight dark beyond the 60-foot high transparent walls.
Max knows he's got to get to this port's control room, but the facility here is much bigger. Attack drones are on his tail now too; three float down from the dark rafters above and join the chase. He spots a restricted hatchway off to his right and ducks toward it. No time to hotwire the door; Max blasts away with his beamer until the latching mechanism is slagged then throws himself into the door. The hatchway creaks and pops open, molten metal hissing and steaming where it lands on Max's armor. He rebounds off the far maintenance wall and takes off just as the Aikoran swings his sword into the wall where his head was. The clunk-whine of a beam rifle freed of its IFF echoes down the corridor behind the stampeding armored men. If Sambasan's anything like Aikoro there should be a control room somewhere in this maze of tunnels.
"Agreed. I've got to take care of some business, then I'll join you in getting this thing prepped."
Walking up to the mess, Davis runs into Semo. "Sergeant, I need some alone time with our prisoners. Could you go downstairs, talk to Swims and One-Ton, and do what they need you to do?"
Sipping a cup of almost-coffee (at least, it is if he doesn't think too hard about it), Luis is almost awake as he tries to find the source of the argument that re-awakened him. Quickly searching the ship, he stumbles across Hugh, standing semi-stunned to the side of the cargo bay doors. He's got that look, the one people get when they aren't looking at anything in the real world. The one they tell you to look out for when talking about PTSD. Shaking his head, Luis steps forward to within arms length. "Cap, you in there?"
Hugh joins Luis as they climb back to the kitchen. With some trepidation, he extracts a coffee-esque liquid from the autochef and gulps it down. Tastes terrible, but there's caffeine.
"Doctor Kilgore snuck out with the sled...and a lot of his gadgets," Hugh explains between sips. "Absent any further information, I'm going to assume the worst. That means our location isn't safe. We need a distraction, and the current plan is to use the Morningstar as a remote-controlled suicide missile against the needleship in orbit. We rig it for remote detonation with our remaining explosives. We make it look like we're running for it. Minimum we get a very public fake death, bonus if we damage the needleship with it."
He finishes the not-coffee.
"I'm gonna need another one of your miracles, Stanhill. We have to make this work."
There are advantages to being a sneaky little sonofabitch. One of them is the ability to be not where people seem to be looking, whenever they're looking for an extra hand. In this case, huddled against the Delta's dwindling cache of conventional arms, sound asleep.
---
Afghanistan, somewhere near the Pakistani border.
"INCOMING!"
An RPG streaks overhead, detonating a good 50 feet away, kicking up another small cloud of ruined dust and mud and concrete. Inaccurate to say the least, but god were those things noisy. A crackle of gunfire - friendly gunfire - in response.
The village had been in ruins before the Deltas got here, not that the aerial photos had spotted that, but they sure as hell would now. A nice little ambush. Poke around the mountains until you find something, hunker down and call for help. Part One had worked perfectly, and the remains of the village had served its purpose for Part Two. Now for Part 3...
"Delta Two, Delta Two, calling for...fuck it...anyone on the air. Surrounded, taking heavy enemy fire, need immediate air support. Over."
Angel looked over as Mike "Ox" Dixon has he slammed the headset back down, hungering a little farther under the remains of the kitchen wall they were hiding behind. With them were two corpses - both insurgents. Poor bastards hadn't seen the Deltas coming, but whoever was in charge of them had picked up that they had gone quiet, and pounded the village. Somewhere out there the Lt was dead, the others scattered to all hell.
Ox rose up again, firing off a few rounds into the distance before jerking back, his neck a ruin of red, gurgling in panic. Angel hunches over, pressing a compress onto the wound, his hands wet with...
This is all wrong. None of this ever happened. Ox made it back from out last tour - hell, so did the Lt. I was at a cookout at his house. Met his wife, Jenn. The man can't cook a steak to save his life.
There is a light crunching noise behind them, someone trying to approach quietly on loose gravel. Angel spins, his gun coming up to the hole in the wall the Deltas used to crawl into this place to begin with. Nothing there. Wait...
A hiss, and a Turai hunter uncloaks, his armor a grotesque imitation of a Hawk. A wickedly sharp blade comes up, and the world goes red.
---
Angel awoke with a start, hitting his head on an ammo crate, his hands clenched in tight fists.
One-ton looks up from some opened access hatches as Semo enters the engine bay.
"Hey Semo," the greasemonkey grunts. "Thanks. I need ya to get everyone who ain't riding the General into the black off the ship. Get their gear off, get them off, get it all off. I need my ship stripped of anything that could slow it down. Then you, me, Stanhill, and the boy are gonna start stripping the interior. We need this done five minutes ago, man. End result, well, she might end up dodgin' a few shots she might'nt dodge otherwise."
Davis waits until Semo is well out of earshot, and then sits down in front of Dunamis. "Alright, let's talk about you and me. Things are developing quickly around here, and we're going to have to get out of the system now. We're going to be making a move in the next few hours, and we can't take you with us for security reasons. I want to know what you're going to say about us if I let you out of here."
"The truth," Mr. Kon says. "I was captured after a bungled apprehension attempt on Max Kilgore. My crew abandoned me and made off with my ship. I was interrogated along with another of my crew and was left here while the traitor freighter made an attempt at escape."
Dunamis thinks. "I'll give 'em Ngawai's name and that you had some local help. You spoke in some unfamiliar language when discussing most everything else."
Hugh moves his personal gear off the Morningstar, then helps with the stripdown. Even the people who weren't paying much attention before begin to notice how quiet and morose he seems - chalk it up to the exhaustion or recent events, but it's there.
Blowing up the ship is a calculated risk. If it works well, they'll have a ready-made symbol for the rebellion's struggles. If it just works, it'll divert some heat off them. If it doesn't work...they'll signal the Imperium that they are still here, still alive and now down a ship.
Admiral Duck Sauce
