That should have made her happy, but she’d reckoned without being the only female in a pack of slack-ass, woman-deprived mouth-breathers she wouldn’t touch with a stick and a pair of rubber gloves. Getting up an hour ahead of those bastards was the only way she managed to shower without the other guys on her shift. She was zipping up her dock kit when she heard the shots.
She was sprinting for the door by the time the echo faded. Barb hadn’t survived damned near eighty years of hostile Arabs, man-eating alien carnosaurs, and scum-of-the-earth pirates by being slow on the uptake. Multiple shots from multiple directions, nearly simultaneously, meant only one thing. For once, she blessed the cheap-assed Darhel that wouldn’t even shell out for a quonset hut armory, as she ran hell for leather for one of the gun lockers on either side of the door, grabbed her rifle and stuffed a handful of loaded magazines in a cargo pocket. She darted out the door with barely a glance outside, knowing speed at getting to her next position would serve her better than caution this early in an attack. Making the cover of the administration building as she began to hear other shooting and noise, she kicked the door in to gain access to the supervisor’s office. Behind his desk, she bashed the locked center drawer with her rifle butt. The cheap wood splintered, letting her yank the remains of the drawer open and pull out a small, black rectangular box. The supervisor’s AID was about the size of a pack of cigarettes and could be counted on to get the message out through the jamming she assumed would be hitting the regular com.
“AID, notify Gistar’s Chicago office that we are under attack by multiple gunmen, repeat, we are under attack by multiple gunmen.” She ignored the obnoxious thing’s queries for more information she didn’t have and dropped it behind a potted plant. “Shut up, AID. If they find you, you can’t eavesdrop on them you stupid machine!” she said.
If silence could sound offended, the AID’s abrupt cut-off spoke volumes — not that Schimmel had time to care. With the word out, her next priority was survival, job or no job. She made for the back door and peered out the window in its top half. This building was sure to be one of their first targets, and a death trap.
A handful of scrubby bushes grew near the fence line at the base of the hill that held the mine entrance. It was meager cover, but better than none, and it had the virtue of not being in any building likely to be a target of hostile action. Its other good point was also its main bad point. It had a good view of the center vehicle yard and the front of the guard barracks, as well as the tracks up to the mine, which meant anyone assaulting the barracks would have a good view of her if they looked her way. She went out the back door, backing up against the building to get a good look and see if she dared make a run for it.
Automatic weapons fire stitching up the ground in front of her decided her against that in a hurry. She ran for the equipment parking lot instead, blessing the inaccuracies of full-auto fire. A hard punch in her right arm, near the shoulder, when she was halfway there had her swearing the air blue as she picked herself up and closed the distance to a hiding place behind a backhoe.
The round that hit her had gone straight through the muscle, fortunately, but it still hurt like a bitch. It took more tugging than she would have expected to rip her sleeve off, but it was the only thing she had to tie around the wound. The attackers had the guard barracks fully engaged. Several grenade blasts from inside the building told her that her side didn’t have a prayer. One of the defenders from the east side of the compound came walking in with his hands up, yelling his surrender. Seeing him shot to bits decided her against that option right quick. She started considering ways to maximize her chances of egressing into the mine. There were water coolers at the entrance, and Indowy-sized canteens. With three or four of those, she could surely hole up somewhere and wait until the counterattack took the mine back from these bastards.
She poked her head up enough to get a quick glance to the southwest, quickly ducking back down as she heard the wheet of bullets over her head and the ping of impacts on the other side of the backhoe. Nope. No way she’d make it up to the entrance of the mine. Tying off the wound and evaluating her options had taken maybe half a minute. Schimmel knew the value of time, even though every second crawled like a slow motion series of snapshots as her ears rang from the small battle. The backhoe was thirty yards or so away from the action — peanuts for even a shitty centerfire rifle on a calm day like this one. She sighed, pulling her ancient, personal army-surplus M-16 to her shoulder, selector set for single shots, and started servicing targets.
Clarty was pretty happy with the way the raid was going. Looked like they’d caught everybody in bed. Bashed in windows and a few grenades took care of most of those, so while Hunter played clean-up with the survivors, he took a man over to the supervisor’s cabin to dig the guy out from under his bed. The fat, middle-aged guy had a pistol, so they didn’t bother to take him alive, but his own guy was down with a gunshot wound that looked to have shattered the leg. The merc leader hit him with an ampule of morphine, plugged it up, slapped a field dressing on top of it, wrapped it, and got back to work. Clarty typically took only one medic into the field and kept him well out of the line of fire. It cost him on casualties, but not nearly as much in a bad situation as if the medic bought it. The medic was safe with the heavy weapons team manning an M-60 and wouldn’t come down the hill until the shooting died down and Rictis or one of his lieutenants sent up a flare to signal it was safe.
He was just out the door when he realized they had a problem. His men were dropping, and the fire was coming from somewhere in the heavy equipment parked on the lot between him and the mine. One well-placed sniper could ruin your whole goddamn day. He tugged the sleeve of a random man and sprinted towards the vehicle lot, going around the bastard’s flank. Between an Indowy vehicle that looked like some sort of crane and a bulldozer, he saw the red-headed guy.
It was a clap shot but the fucker must have been psychic or something. He rolled just as Clarty got his shot off. It was a hit, a palpable hit, but the fucker made it to cover.
And the roll told Clarty something else. “He” was a she. You didn’t see that much these days.
He moved around the front of the bulldozer and slid an optic around the side. Sure enough, she was on the ground trying to plug a nasty hole in her left side.
“Give it up,” Clarty said. “You’ve fought hard enough for what they pay you.”
“Anybody who fights for pay isn’t worth it,” the woman gasped. “So fuck you.” The M-16 she was carrying came up and his fiber camera was toast.
“Damn it! Those things are expensive!” Clarty paused. She was in a pretty good position. Digging her out might mean more casualties. Part of his contract with the tribes was double pay for casualties. Keeping them down meant more profit for him. “My point is, fighting to the last man is for situations that are worth it. Not keeping my paws off the Gistar Group’s tantalum.”
“Like you’re going to let any of us live.” There was a snort followed by a gasp.
“Surrender and I’ll let you live,” Clarty said, mentally kicking himself. He was actually thinking about it. “We’ll leave in a bit, Gistar comes back in. Maybe they’ll give you a bonus or something.”
“Your word as a pirate, right?”
“Do you have a better option?”