Parker Interstellar Travels 4: The Trilisk Hunt (4 page)

Chapter
6

The next day, Arakaki met up
with the recruits in one of the
Clacker
’s amazing mess halls and started
building a team out of them. Telisa and Magnus had at least come clean with the
four of them and persuaded them to stay and learn what being a member of PIT
would be like. None of them had committed to anything long term.

“Today let’s start pure
virtual,” she told them in a wide-open room of the
Clacker
. “Very basic.
Just a warmup to see what you can do. There’s a simple warehouse, Earth
gravity, at night. One of your friends has been taken hostage by a frontier
gang. You go in there and get your friend out. I’ll show you what he looks
like. Normally, you’ll get to plan your own approach, and you’ll likely have
some fun hardware. For now, though, you have only basic weapons, and it’s
pretty straightforward. The interior plan will change with each attempt.”

“We’re practicing military
operations? Did you understand that I’m a xenobiologist?” asked Maxsym.

“Sure I understand,” Arakaki
said. “Look, this is a team-building exercise. It also lets me see your
aptitudes. If you don’t show any combat aptitude, it doesn’t mean we don’t want
you. As you said, you have other skillsets. As far as the real missions, there
you’ll end up in combat only if we can’t avoid it. Suppose you’re out there on
an unexplored planet with us, studying an amazing new life form. We might be
attacked by someone else on the frontier.”

Best if you know what you’re
doing, just in case,
Arakaki thought.

Arakaki gave them a generated
face to attach to their friend and ran the simulation. She set herself up as an
invisible observer to watch them. The team assembled within her virtual world.
They wore dark clothing and held projectile carbines in their hands. Each had a
pistol and a knife at their belt.

“For purposes of this exercise,
assume a remote team member has neutralized their automated defenses. You may
assume their security sensor arrays as well as any connected hardware have been
rendered inert. Caden, as a Glades champ, you should be familiar with this sort
of thing, so take the team lead to start out,” Arakaki instructed.

The four moved down a dark
street on some fictitious colony world. They got their first look at the
warehouse from a distance. It was all metal struts and carbon panels, rising as
high as a three-story building above them, nestled in a district of other
warehouses and dock buildings.

“Okay then,” Caden said.
“Identify all the entrances. Siobhan with me. You two go around the other
direction. Then we’ll all go in at the single entrance we choose.”

Imanol nodded and led Maxsym
around the building. They kept a good distance, in the shadows of a nearby
structure. Imanol hid his carbine under his jacket.

“They’re probably taking video
of the area so hide your weapons and act like we’re lost,” Imanol said to
everyone over his link. “Just some people who took a wrong turn trying to find
a party,” he said.

Arakaki could tell Imanol had
done some security work. Maxsym was getting points for trying, at least. As she
had said, the warehouse had no external surveillance active for this first
trial, but his advice did not hurt. Everything would be almost as easy as it
could get. Caden did not challenge the advice or seem to mind it.

Arakaki flipped her attention
back to Caden. She smiled. The boy moved like a jungle cat. Siobhan looked
amateur next to him, though to be fair, she was not doing poorly. In fact, she
did better than Arakaki expected for an automation specialist.

Siobhan looks more suited to
this than Maxsym, though.

She watched as the team found
three entrances. There were others, a locked door on the top, broken windows on
the sides well above ground level, and a sewer entrance, but she did not expect
them to find those, and Caden was not trying. He knew his team could
realistically only enter from the ground floor given their limited equipment
and training. Caden chose the most obscure ground-level entrance, a stained
metal door around on the side away from the street. It was locked, but not part
of a security system this time. Arakaki knew that when she started dialing up
the difficulty, that would no longer be the case.

When they forced the door, the
program tested to see if their entrance was detected. On the lax settings,
nothing happened. The group had made it into the building unnoticed. Caden led the
way in, hiding among a row of quiescent cargo moving robots. Sounds of other
loading robots working filtered through the dark, damp warehouse.

“We need to find an office or
some other smaller room where they’d keep a prisoner,” Caden said over his
link. “We’ll proceed to the northeast corner, you two to the northwest corner
just over there. Hopefully we’ll be able to see the length of the warehouse and
spot the office. If we don’t, we can assume it’s by the southwest where the
cargo road comes in.”

Caden and Siobhan made good
time toward the northeast corner. The concrete below their feet was cracked and
wet. The lights far above shone in the wet surfaces around them. Caden took a
deep sniff.

“Damn, this is a high quality
sim,” he muttered to himself. Arakaki was probably the only one who heard him.
She smiled.

That’s because it’s running on
the
Clacker.

Imanol and Maxsym moved more
slowly to their corner, which was much closer.

“I can see halfway through the
warehouse from here,” Imanol transmitted, peeking around a support beam. “The
obstruction is structural; no sign of the office.”

“Okay, hold,” Caden said.

The office was about sixty
meters down on Caden and Siobhan’s side, nestled against the mirror image of
the central supporting strut of the building’s ceiling that Imanol had referred
to on their side.

“We have it in sight,” Caden
said. “Come back over to our corner. Carefully. There may be a patrol. Just
stay undercover and keep quiet.”

The explicit micromanagement
made Arakaki wince internally, but she knew with Maxsym on her team and one of
her friends hostage, she’d say the same thing. Once Maxsym found his legs,
there would be no need for such babysitting.

“The office is raised above the
floor. Double sets of stairs. I see two men hanging out up there. Both armed,”
Caden summarized. When Imanol and Maxsym arrived, Caden was ready.

“We can approach half this
distance without being spotted. Then we assault. But first we have to cover. I
saw a guard walking around the perimeter. Follow me,” he said. The team moved
forward two rows and hid behind a group of huge plastic crates. They crouched there
in the shadows until a guard had passed on the walkway above.

“Why do they have human guards
instead of machines?” Siobhan asked.

“To make the test easier,”
Imanol answered. “Though sometimes, gangs don’t use machines because of the
extra hassle with the government. I would expect dirt-simple, hard-to-hack,
non-logging electronic sensors and security devices.”

“Neutralized, remember?” Caden
said. “May we proceed?” Arakaki smiled to herself.

Caden did not wait for an
answer. He led the way forward. Up ahead, the team approached the core of the
gang who had captured their friend. Arakaki knew there were five armed men here
by the prisoner. Two combatants patrolled the building, and two more guarded
the main entrance.

Caden took a quick look from
their hidden position.

“There’s our friend,” he
guessed. He indicated a lit room behind the two men. “Either that, or it’s a
trap for us.”

“What now?” asked Imanol.

“Cover me,” Caden urged. He
flew into action like a machine.

Snap, snap.

He fired two shots with his carbine,
killing both of the gang members above. The sound of the compact weapon was not
loud, yet the distinct sound carried in the warehouse. He rolled forward to the
cover of a crate on the right and then fell prone beside it. When two enemies
moved to flank them from the side of the office, he picked them off calmly and
efficiently.

Snap, snap.

Four down, and the others have
barely had time to shit their pants! He’s good. Damn good. Blood Glades champ
all right.

Once Imanol realized Caden had
taken a forward position, he started to fire steadily to cover for him. Maxsym
did the same, but he spent more time covering and less time shooting.

Snick, snick, snick… snap.

I know that type. He doesn’t
have the stomach for it, not really. Push comes to shove, he’ll probably fold.
At least he knows it.

Siobhan moved to the left,
trying to flank the enemy on the other side. But she had not told the others
where she was headed. A guard ran along the walkway, headed toward the office.
She fired at him once, twice, missing each time. The guard aimed to return
fire. Siobhan let her weapon lock on and shot one more time. The man fell just
before he could shoot.

Meanwhile, Maxsym’s head
appeared over his cover, and he loosed a shot toward Siobhan. But she had
already moved under cover, so the round could not hit even though it had locked
on.

“I’m going in,” Caden
transmitted, but he was already in the office. He opened a door then moved
aside, allowing rounds to fly through the opening, but he was not in the line
of fire. He returned fire through the flimsy wall, then ran by the door to get
a look.

Hrm. He could have hit his
friend, there. Though I see his rounds were angled downward. A bit risky.

Caden had an idea of the room
beyond and had seen his friend. Now he fired more quickly, stitching rounds
through the front part of the office away from the prisoner.

Snap… snap, snap, snap.

Out in the warehouse, Imanol
had foreseen the arrival of more gang members from the front. He shot one as
the man passed his hiding spot. Maxsym exchanged fire with the second. Maxsym
was on the wrong side of his crate, still covering from the office but not the
man coming in from the front of the warehouse.

Riiiiiiiip!

One of the guards let off a
long burst of high velocity rounds. Maxsym was sitting with his back against a
crate, making a small target. It saved him, allowing him to hit the attacker
with a round first.

That would not go well on real
settings, but you have to start somewhere,
Arakaki thought.

Caden moved into the prisoner’s
room. He kept his weapon raised and moved sideways along a wall toward the
prisoner, who was secured to a chair. A gang member popped up from behind a
desk, weapon in hand.

Snap! Snap!

Caden shot her through the head
before she was even ten centimeters above the desk.

Caden shifted his weapon and
then checked himself quickly when he saw Siobhan enter from the far side. She
started.

“I didn’t know you made it this
far,” he explained.

“I’m in,” she reported late.
“We’re untying our friend. We just need to get out,” she sent to the team.

“How many down?” Caden asked
the team.

“I got one,” Siobhan said.

“I got two,” Imanol said.

“Me too,” said Maxsym. “I mean,
I got one.”

“Let’s head out the back, then,
in case reinforcements arrive at the front.”

They converged under the
office. Caden led the team out. The simulation made the remaining combatants
very cautious, so they failed to move in on the retreating extraction team. All
four made it out alive with the captive.

That could have been worse
,
Arakaki thought. She remembered her own first combat simulations. They had been
bloodbaths. Of course, Caden was hardly just starting out, and from the looks
of it, Imanol and Siobhan had experience too. Either real or simulated.

Arakaki cut the sim.

“All alive. Good enough,” she
said. “Lonrack. You did well. Siobhan, I liked your flank, but Maxsym just
about shot you when you appeared way out in left field. You guys have to be
aware of each other. Usually that’s achieved with link chatter until the team
is highly trained, then you just become aware of each other’s video feeds by
instinct. We’ll work on it. Imanol, good anticipation. You knew more gang
members would come in from the front when combat broke out.” Arakaki shifted
her gaze to Maxsym. “Our xenobiologist survived, but just barely. I hope you’re
a fast learner.”

Maxsym nodded. “I haven’t done
this kind of simulation since I was a kid. The technology has improved
significantly.”

“The team lacked crisp
teamwork. Not surprising for your first time out. I have something to attend
to,” Arakaki explained. “Telisa’s going to talk with you about… aliens, I
think.”

“Can I ask what happened to
Krellis?” Caden said. “After the interviews, you guys showed us our rooms and
everything, and they’re truly awesome, but none of us saw Krellis after that.”

Arakaki paused. “Krellis washed
out,” she said.

“Wow, that’s surprising,”
Siobhan said neutrally. “He wasn’t impressed by all this?”

“As we said, we intend to
convince you to join us. However, in Krellis’s case, well, he was a spy. When
we asked him those basic questions we asked all you, he lied. So we don’t want
him. The rest of you are all on the level.”

The recruits digested that.
Caden was the first to ask the obvious question.

“Well, who was he spying for?”

The truth but not the truth
, Arakaki
told herself.

“The competition? It doesn’t
matter. Our lives are on the line out here sometimes. Everyone has to be
playing on the same team. That guy plays for someone else, y’know? We don’t
want him. Who knows when he would betray us, any of us—maybe even kill us!”