Merkiaari Wars: 03 - Operation Oracle (37 page)

Fault logged. Continue reboot sequence.

TRS... done.

Sensors... done.

Targeting... done.

Communications... failed to initialise.

Retry/Abort? >_

Retry/Abort? >_

Retry/Abort? >_

Fault logged. Continue reboot sequence...

Infonet... service not available.

TacNet... failed to initialise.

Retry/Abort? >_

Retry/Abort? >_

Retry/Abort? >_

Fault logged. Continue reboot sequence...

Initiate emergency reactivation...

Gina awoke to agony, but she didn’t scream. The burning pain in her back warranted it, my god did it, but she was in such bad shape she couldn’t scream. She was gagging on blood and the air was foul. She coughed trying to clear the blood from her lungs and that helped a little. She was shivering with cold, ice had formed on her eyelashes and her face burned with it. Frostbite was in her immediate future, she realised.

She groaned trying to think. Her internal display was awash in warnings and system failures. She shook with cold and shock. Main power failure? What the hell did that mean? Why wasn’t she dead then? She puzzled over that and realised her systems were barely running on backup power. All of them, and she didn’t have much time. Her log told the tale. She was dying. IMS was offline due to low resources, and without it she couldn’t repair main power. She needed shipboard medical or a full blown hospital, but she was shit out of luck there.

She needed her supplements, but they were in the APC, the APC she hadn’t brought with her. She frantically tried to think of something and realised how rattled she was. Dome three was barely a hundred metres away and there would be crates of what she needed in there. She had to get them. It was her only chance.

Main power failure. Warning... unit termination imminent.

“Yeah, yeah. Everyone’s a critic,” she mumbled and coughed. The burning in her throat and nose was getting worse without IMS to keep pace with the accumulating damage. She tried to rise and realised things were worse than she’d realised. “I’m dead,” she said flatly and knew it was true.

She was paralysed below the waist.

She didn’t panic. There was nothing but regret running through her thoughts for a few minutes. She managed to roll onto her back and hissed as the snow touched her burns through the suit. Her PLSS had exploded and was completely gone, as was most of her suit back there. Bare skin, burned and ruined, contacted the ice and sensation quickly fled. That was a blessing. Her thoughts began to clear and she checked her sensors. She should have done that first thing, but under the circumstances it was a miracle she was even alive let alone tracking enough to think of the tactical situation.

Her processor had brought her back online because she would have died without waking if it hadn’t. The fact she would die anyway, and in agony, didn’t matter to it. Her survival for as long as possible was all it cared about and it had been out of options. She would have died in hibernation, so it woke her. Simple logic.

Sensors... right. She had been about to check her sensors hadn’t she? She barely had power for this, but what the hell. She wanted to know what was happening. Maybe Eric was on his way. Her sensors revealed another story, and rage filled her thoughts. She actually snarled at what her sensors reported to her. Four red icons were moving around in the residential dome, and a small lander was parked next to her cargo shuttle. Her PLSS hadn’t just failed, it had been helped along. Stupid to have assumed it in the first place, and she cursed herself. One or more of those red icons had shot her in the back hitting the power pack in her PLSS.

That had to be it.

Her thoughts flashed to her rifle sitting atop the crate in dome three. She rolled onto her front and started dragging herself toward the dome. She was leaving a trail in the snow a five year old could follow, but she had no choice. Coughing and gasping at the foul crap she was forced to breathe, she dragged her useless body up the cargo ramp and into the dome. Inside, she headed for the crate with her rifle on top. It was stupid, but she felt much better with it in her hands. She was still dying, and her priority should have been supplies for her IMS, but she had ignored common sense and armed herself instead.

Main power failure. Warning... unit termination imminent.

Gina dragged herself to the stacks, and then deeper between them until she found the small cluster of crates and boxes set aside for viper use. The snakehead stencilled on the sides together with code numbers that matched those in her database for supplements, ammo, etc, advised her which ones she needed. She used the butt of her rifle to smash her way in. Cans and bottles rained down upon and around her.

Main power failure. Warning... unit termination imminent.

Propped sitting against the palettes, Gina grabbed the first can within reach. She shook it half-heartedly and coughed. She spat redly and eyed the lump on the floor. Was that a piece of lung rotted by the toxic air? Didn’t matter. She popped the top off the can and chugged her smoothie. It didn’t taste as disgusting as she expected. Maybe she was craving this crap because her body knew she needed it? Nah, probably the air had messed with her taste buds.

She grabbed a bottle this time. It contained capsules of vitamins and metal salts. They never tasted of anything because they were time lapse capsules designed to dissolve in the stomach. She didn’t think she had time for niceties. She opened the bottle and poured the contents into her mouth. She chewed and forced herself to swallow. My god that had tasted foul. She washed the foul tasting mess down with another smoothie.

Main power failure. Warning... unit termination imminent.

She chugged and chewed and chugged and chewed waiting to die or for some other sign that she wouldn’t.

>_ IMS: Repairs in progress.

Gina was chewing capsules and chugging smoothies, while watching for hostiles approaching. She didn’t notice at first when her IMS came back online, but she did notice when her processor tried to put her back in hibernation! Dumb machine. There were hostiles nearby and ready to follow her trail, and it wanted her to sleep?

No frigging way!

Computer: Abort hibernation.

Hibernation aborted. Warning, hibernation advised. Intervention logged.

Gina sighed. Her processor sounded a little pissy about her daring to intervene. She would have laughed if she didn’t hurt so much. She contemplated forcing IMS to repair her comm immediately, she really wanted to talk to Eric, but she didn’t do it. Main power had to come first. The damage to her spine had taken it out as well as her legs. Hopefully repairing one would give her back the other at the same time.

She chugged another smoothie, discarded the empty on the growing pile and opened another. Sensors warned her of company approaching, but she did nothing but watch. She needed to stay close to her supplies and repairs weren’t far enough along. She chugged two more smoothies, feeling sick now. Too much crap to digest. She raised her rifle and waited for a target.

The first man came in sloppy. He had a pistol raised, but didn’t use the available cover. There was plenty to use, he should really have known better. Her targeting reticule pulsed redly and spun on her display. She forced away a cough and put a single round down range centred upon the visor of his helmet. He dropped instantly dead. She allowed herself a cough, and opened another bottle of pills.

>_ Diagnostics: Main power online. Critical spinal injury, communications failure, TacNet offline, lung capacity 68%. Unit unfit for duty. Hospitalisation at earliest opportunity advised.

>_ IMS: Repairs in progress.

Ha! It was working. She was out of danger, relatively speaking. If no one killed her, she would be fine given enough time for repairs. She was bloody freezing, and the air was bad, but IMS could keep pace as long as it had the resources. She was sitting on a mountain of what it needed. She was as good as fixed as long as she could hold off the bad guys.

Thinking of them seemed to draw them out. They fired at her wildly and she could do little about it. They didn’t hit her, but the crates and boxes exploded around her, raining their contents all over her. Liquids sprayed and dripped, while she tried to find a target, but they weren’t as stupid as the first one. They exposed only the barrels of their weapons. She switched to her grenade launcher and used one of the three precious HE rounds she had loaded it with. The explosion silenced the incoming fire, but she had missed them. She watched them on sensors regrouping.

A spasm seized her chest and she coughed, but she decided her breathing was much better now. The burning in the back of her throat was still present. She doubted it would quit until she could find another suit.

The shot hit her square on, dead centre in the belly. She grunted and clutched at the wound, wishing for her armour, but she couldn’t wear a suit over it. She hadn’t brought it, and neither had Eric. She returned fire without aiming. Both grenades went wild and blew one of the stacks apart. Debris flew in all directions, but the three red icons still glared balefully on her sensors. The burning boxes quickly extinguished themselves as designed, though they continued to smoulder filling the dome with smoke that streamed out the open loading doors. Anything transported through space had to be fire resistant.

Gina kept her rifle up and aimed into the smoke, though she couldn’t see a damned thing. She switched to infra, but the smouldering crates made it useless. Too many false positives. She switched back and tried zooming in. Maybe at X2 she would catch movement. Nothing. Back at X1 she watched them on sensors, and waited for their next move.

The burning agony in her guts quickly dulled as IMS flooded the area with pain blockers. The wound had hurt but it hadn’t hit anything vital. It wouldn’t be the wound that killed her, and right now that was good enough. One handed, rifle still aimed, she popped the lid off another smoothie and chugged it, still feeling sick but needing to keep IMS running at maximum efficiency. She had to last long enough to get her legs back, or long enough for Eric to come. Either one worked for her.

Sensors warned her when the raiders had regained their courage, and she cursed when they split up. They had finally grown a brain between them. She shifted aim, planning to kill the first one to give her half a chance. She wished she had more grenades. While she was wishing, she might as well wish for an AAR and someone to use it. She had what she had—her V2 pistol and her rifle.

* * *

Approaching alpha site, Landing, Kushiel

Eric watched his sensors like a hawk on his return trip from base camp. He had every expectation that the raiders would come down and attempt to dispose of all witnesses. He was counting on it actually. If they were wise they would simply jump out system and come back in a couple of months. Everyone would be dead by then. They wouldn’t do that though—he hoped. He needed a way off this rock, and they had a ship. It was a nice one too. Anything with a fold space drive was a nice one as far as he was concerned.

He snorted at his whimsical thought.

He was flying the scenic route back toward alpha site, not because he feared being followed. The raiders were in orbit and could track him easily. No, he did it so that a single attack wouldn’t take both him and Gina out of the game. He had limited resources. Two vipers, two APCs and contents, and two slow lumbering cargo shuttles. That was it. He didn’t count Liz and her people among resources. They were on the liability side of the equation. He didn’t have anything to arm them with for one thing. The APCs had weapons and ammo, but viper gear was different to standard Alliance gear. It couldn’t be used by the unenhanced and had been designed that way on purpose after a mission had gone pear-shaped allowing the bad guys to arm themselves with the regiment’s own equipment. Burgton had been shot. He hadn’t been amused. Viper weapons needed vipers to operate and that was that. Even if he had some standard gear on hand he wouldn’t issue it to Liz’s people. They were more likely to shoot themselves in the foot or him than the bad guys. They were marvellous engineers, but soldiers?

No.

Sensors reported all clear, just as he wanted. Gina was probably down and already filling her shuttle with more loot. Hope she remembers the supplements, he mused. He hadn’t thought about them until now. It was rare that he was on a mission long enough to need such supplies. The regiment’s long deployment with the Shan had been an exception rather than the rule. It had been many years since he had deployed with so many of his brothers to fight. Most of his missions had been solo ops and of short duration. This one promised to be more challenging than anyone had anticipated.