The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (70 page)

“Summon your relief,” he ordered. “You and your team are with me.”

They stared just a moment too long, and he gave them a fiery glare.

“Yes, Commander!” the coranth in charge stammered out, immediately sending one of his men to call for a relief team. While they were waiting, he nervously eyed the big Colonial commander. “What are we doing, then, Commander?”

“We’re going to go inform some civilians about the facts of life and what happens when you refuse to provide needed support during a critical military crisis,” Nero said, his teeth showing just a little too much.

The coranth fell back a step, involuntarily putting some distance between himself and what he perceived viscerally as a threat to his life.

The relief crew arrived quickly. Then Nero hustled the team out and into the public transport tubes that interconnected the entire massive metropolis. They commandeered a car for themselves, waving a few civilians and even what looked like a councilman back while Nero called out the destination.

He and the security team were both shocked to find that their path had been precleared and priority routed. They
shunted aside several other cars in the few seconds of high-speed travel that brought them from the center of the system’s command and control base to the city’s industrial sector. While the transport tubes were extremely fast, it normally took several minutes to cross the city center due to the regular pauses in motion while cars higher in the queue were directed to their destination.

We were jumped to the top of the queue. How? I didn’t even bother requesting it. It would have taken longer to get that clearance than to simply deal with the delays.

Nero didn’t have time to think on it just then, however, as the car came to a rest near their destination and they disembarked into the lobby room of that section of the Mons Systema central pyramid and walked the short distance through the corridors to where the Office of Municipal Maintenance was located.

“Commander?” Coranth Sinu spoke up, clearly confused. “Why are we here?”

“I need to speak with a
man
,” Nero said, twisting the word dryly, “about his duty to our home. Do as I say, otherwise remain silent and stern in the background. Understood?”

“Y…yes, Commander.”

It was times like this that Nero disliked the smoothly melting doors that existed within the city proper of Mons Systema. On the outer colony he had been raised on, they had doors that swung open on flexi-spines.
You could kick those open when you wanted to make a point.

The door melted away as he stepped up to it, and he focused on glaring intimidatingly at anyone that crossed his line of sight. Those who did quickly found other places to be as the unusually large and apparently quite angry man stomped through the offices.

“Manager Lithsa,” he growled once as he located the source of his current mood, “I would like to have a word.”

“C…commander,” the short, noticeably pudgy man stammered out.

“I have need of your crews.”

“I already told you, I won’t take my crews out into a war zone!” Lithsa rallied from his shock.

“And you will not be turned from that decision?”

“I will not.”

“Arrest him,” Nero growled, waving his men forward.

“What?”

The security men stared in shock.

“Commander…Are you certain?”

“I have here orders from Central to move those crews into place”—Nero held up his display—“and authority to get them there by any means necessary. Lithsa, if you will not move your crews out, I will find someone here who will.”

The security men stared in shock between the men for a moment, the situation completely beyond their expectations. They weren’t authorized to arrest or detain citizens, at least not normally, but if anyone or anything on the planet could change that, it would be Central.

Nero knew that he was on thin ice, at least so far as his traditional authority extended. For various reasons, military authority within Mons Systems was extremely curtailed outside of direct action. However, with the writ provided by Central, he could at least exert some real-world pressure on the situation. If he had time, Nero was confident that he even could have had the man prosecuted in open court. Time, however, was not on his side in this case, so he was going to push harder and faster than would normally be advisable, and when it was done, they could have his rank if that was the consequence.

Lithsa, however, was having none of it. The smaller man was an alarming shade of red as he shook his fist in the air.

“You can’t do this! I know where your authority stops, and you’ve overstepped by so far you’d need an orbital satellite to relay the distance!” he yelled, growing redder and redder as he bulked up his reactor mass.

Nero was about to order his arrest again when someone else cut in.

“I’ll do it.”

Everyone fell silent, looking over to where a man was walking out of the back of the offices.

“What?” Lithsa blurted.

“I’ll lead a team in,” the man said calmly. “Volunteers only. I won’t let you press-gang anyone into this.”

“That’s fine. Get your team together, gather your gear, and make it fast,” Nero rumbled in return, the two of them completely ignoring Manager Lithsa as he started to get even redder.

“Micra! You don’t have the authority to—”

His blustering came to an abrupt end when Nero stepped forward and clamped a big meaty hand on his shoulder, then almost literally threw him at one of the military security people he’d brought.

“Detain him until the current crisis is over,” Nero ordered. “If that fool slows us down, we could lose the entire city.”

“Yes, Commander…” The man hesitated. “Are you certain, though?”

“On my personal authority.” Nero nodded. “I will deal with the consequences.”

The man nodded, this time with less hesitancy. “Yes, Commander, it will be done.”

“It is done,” Nero answered. “Secure him in his own rooms, but put a guard in place.”

“Understood.”

“Go now.”

“Yes, Commander!” the guard said, before dragging the still-protesting man along with him.

Nero turned to the man who had spoken up. “Micra, is it?”

“Yes, Commander.” The younger man nodded.

“I will not lie, this is not to be a safe operation,” Nero said. “The Drasin collapsed several buildings on their own position during their…
infiltration
of the area. We have teams in place to deal with them, but with all that material, my people are unable to get to them.”

“I understand, Commander,” Micra replied, hesitating. “What of rescue operations?”

Nero looked grim. “If you can pull anyone out alive, I expect you to do so, but I do not expect that you will find many. The impact was…energetic.”

“I understand. Still, we must try.”

“Then we understand one another,” Nero confirmed. “Gather your team. We have work ahead of us.”

RANQUIL, BRAVO AO

▸“THIS IS LOOKING bad,” Sean Bermont confided over the private battle network, speaking with the major while the two of them looked over shared data compiled from the seismographic sensors. He’d seen bad before, but this was really bad. Sean was starting to wish he were back home with his bike and a few hundred klicks of open road.

“Agreed. Can you do anything?”

“Not at present,” the Canadian admitted tiredly. “We don’t have enough demo gear here to clear this mess, so we’re waiting on locals. The honcho here says that the big cheese in charge of the militia was taking a personal hand in it, but he doesn’t have anything new yet.”

“Right. Well, if Commander Jehan said it’ll be handled, it’ll be handled, is my impression of the man,” Brinks replied. “What I’m concerned about is the timeline. The readings are getting stronger.”

“Aye,” Sean said, disgusted by the situation. “Any chance you could detail Burke and Savoy over here to maybe drop some deep-penetration munitions on them?”

“I could, but without getting a clean idea of the impact cavern and what they’ve dug out, we couldn’t be sure of getting everything,” Brinks said. “Try and get some more seismographs into place while I requisition a couple thumpers to try and map that area out.”

“Roger that. Wilco,” Sean confirmed. “We’ll get things in place.”

“Good luck, Lieutenant,” Brinks said from his position on the overwatch shuttle, orbiting the multiple impact points.

“Thanks, Major.” Sean paused, cocking his head as an alert popped up on his HUD. “Hold one. Major, we have trouble brewing here.”

“Confirmed. Details?”

“I think they’re coming out of their hole.”

“Pull back, Lieutenant!” Major Brinks ordered. “Don’t get caught in the middle of that mess!”

“Roger. Wilco!” Sean Bermont confirmed, already moving and sending orders over the waypoint system. “Time for us to earn our pay here, Major.”

“Good luck, Lieutenant.”

The major signed off while Sean was already in motion, running toward the local militia group leader who was helping put another seismo kit into place.

“Time to move!” he called over the open comm, his voice echoing from the wreckage all around them. “We have company coming!”

The coranth looked up, sharply and with confusion clearly on his face. “Company? Who?”

“The unfriendly kind!” Sean snarled, pointing at the ground.

It took several seconds for the young officer to make the connection, as he was not used to thinking of threats, but to
his credit, as soon as he realized what Sean was talking about, he started giving orders that matched those Sean had already issued to his own men.

“Everyone, move back! The Drasin are coming to the surface!”

Hesitation kills in combat, and Coranth Gemma learned that the hard way when his own people stared at him for a second longer than they had. Explosions of dirt and dust erupted up from around their feet, and three of them were pulled down into the newly filled holes beneath them. They had time to scream, but little else before their lives were strangled off along with the sound of their shock and dismay.

Sean didn’t hesitate. He grabbed Gemma and the closest militiaman beside him and leapt up and into the debris of the buildings around them. Behind him, the ground they had stood on exploded into dust and debris, and Drasin drone soldiers the size of large dogs erupted out and swarmed the ground.

“Off the dirt, boys!” he called in midair, crushing the breath out of his “recuees.” “Grab the locals if you can, but don’t be around when they come for you.”

There was no round of acknowledgments from his men—not vocally, at least. Their icons lit up across his HUD as they toggled the simple “acknowledged” option and leapt into action. Around them, the ground was riddled with puffs of dirt and debris as the Drasin exploded out, often right on their heels as they ran just one step ahead of their pursuers.

“They’re coming right up through the concrete,” Sean muttered, pretty shocked by that turn of events. He hadn’t really thought that they were in serious danger, at least not in such an immediate fashion.

“Concrete?” the coranth asked in confusion while he was gasping for breath beside Sean.

They and the ithan he had grabbed were perched about twenty meters up on the horizontal remains of what passed for a local skyscraper. Not that it didn’t, in fact, scrape the sky, in his opinion, it was just that Sean wasn’t used to seeing buildings quite so large. He was also a little put out by the fact that it was still almost intact despite the fact that it was lying on its side in the middle of an orbital impact zone.

“Yeah, the surface material.”

“I am not sure what concrete is,” the coranth admitted, “but that is three-foot-thick ceramic composite. The Drasin must have used explosives to broach the surface.”

“Not unless they have some really kick-ass-shaped charges.” Bermont shook his head. “The back blast would have fried them. They’re tough, but we know they can be taken out by overpressure.”

“Then I do not know, but it takes an industrial laser to slice through that material.”

“Well, one thing about those things”—Sean shrugged—“we know that they have lasers on par with your own military models.”

“Lasers would have cut through and burned through us as well!”