“Yeah. Since we’re just civvie diplomats again, I had to change the module’s designation from military to—” Trevor stopped. “Oh, Christ.”
Caine nodded. “You changed it to a diplomatic code.”
Hazawa’s voice announced, “Enemy craft closing through fifty kilometers. Stand by to—” Static surged over his last order.
Trevor felt a flash of hot moisture rise on his brow. He slapped his collarcom, noticed that the cutter’s PDF pod had powered up. “So the attackers think—”
“—that we’re flying a diplomatic pennon: a white flag. One of their commo officers must know how to read our data streams and noticed it embedded in either the transponder code, the distress signal, or both.”
Trevor nodded. “Lieutenant Hazawa, please respond.” Nothing. Where the hell—?
And just as Hazawa responded—sounding more confident, relieved, and excited—the bridge back-chatter confirmed what Trevor saw happening on his subsystem activity monitor. Behind Hazawa’s energetic, “Yes, Captain?” was a whoop that almost drowned out the background report that Trevor dreaded hearing. “Direct hit on the enemy ship, sir. The bogey is venting atmosphere and angling away erratically. Reacquiring—”
“No, Lieutenant!” Trevor shouted into his static-ridden collarcom. “Stand down, stand—!”
Hazawa’s “Say again?” vied with another excited report. “Multiple hits in her stern, sir. She’s corkscrewing badly. I think we hit her engines—”
“Cease fire, cease—!” Trevor was shouting, when Caine’s hand came down hard on his shoulder. Trevor yanked away. “What?”
Caine’s voice was eerily calm. “We’ve got to detach.”
“What the hell are you—?”
“We’ve got only seconds now. What’s the procedure?”
Detach? What the hell was Caine talking about—?
And then Trevor saw two new bogeys light up, one only one hundred twenty klicks away.
Caine nodded toward the two red triangles. “The enemy left drones laying doggo out here. And we’ve just made ourselves a target.”
The EM emission sensor shrilled throughout the cutter.
“They’ve acquired and locked. Trevor—”
Not even the time to say goodbye to Hazawa. What a shitty business this is—Trevor pulled open a red cover to his lower left, grabbed the recessed handle, turned it sharply to the left so that he could pull it straight up. And did so.
The blast of the emergency jettisoning charges—only twelve feet behind them—was deafening as the hab mod blew itself away from the cutter’s keel. Caine lost the grip on his seat, spiraled off at an angle, slammed into a bulkhead, and floated free: stunned, unconscious, or dead.
The external viewing screen showed a slowly somersaulting image of the crippled cutter, now bookended by two explosions in rapid succession, one at the bow and one in the stern. Modules and pieces of her went cartwheeling in all directions. Trevor saw another flash back in the engine decks: a small secondary, back near the containment rings. Meaning that any second now—
Trevor scooped his feet under him so that they were on the seat, twisted and kicked off toward Caine. He cinched him around the waist as he passed, bumped to an awkward but fast stop, reverse kicked. He regained the acceleration couch, pulled Caine on top of him, pulled a strap across them both—
—just as the cutter’s engine decks erupted outwards into a sudden, angry, blue-white star.
The screen blanked the same instant that the shock wave hit.
Chapter Seven
Richard Downing entered the office he had shared with Nolan Corcoran for more than a decade, and stared wistfully at the couch in the waiting room. Sleep would be very welcome and would come all too easily. He had been planetside less than six hours and had already briefed the POTUS, the Joint Chiefs, and the intelligence agencies. And only now could his real work begin.
Once in the conference room, he activated the commplex, told it to place a call, dropped into a chair, and rubbed his face so he would appear alert and fresh. Well, alert. Mostly.
The commplex checked Downing’s identity and then indicated that the requested individual was on the line. “Mr. Rulaine,” he said, stifling a yawn, “I trust you’ve found your early retirement from the Special Forces relaxing?”
“Yes, sir. A little too relaxing.”
“Well, we’ll remedy that soon enough. Now, about your team: their medical discharges went through without a problem?”
“Yes sir, although the clerk did eyeball the five of us pretty strangely.”
Downing imagined the scene: the five men—a Green Beret (Rulaine himself), three SEALs (Jacob Winfield, Stanislaus Witkowski, and Carlos Cruz) and a bear of a Secret Service agent (Matthew Barr)—clustered around a desk to “medical out” of their respective services. “Medical cause, sir?” the clerk would have asked. “Unspecified,” Bannor Rulaine would have answered in the flat baritone that was his all-business voice. And that first question would have been the last that the clerk asked the five of them.
“And you are satisfied with the authenticity of the fictional security firm that is now retaining your services?”
Bannor nodded. “Yes sir. Incorporation papers, contact data, client lists, transactions, all perfectly legit, even if scrutinized by a Congressional subcommittee. And by the way, I would like to convey the group’s collective thanks for the very generous employment terms.”
Which you will earn many times over, you poor sods. “You are all very welcome. I’m short on time, Captain, so let’s review the OpOrds. My system will require a real-time biometric security check, so please activate your video pickup.”
“Will do, sir.” The screen on Downing’s commplex faded up from black, revealing Bannor Rulaine’s thinning sandy hair and calm hazel eyes. Downing nodded a greeting, watched the OpOrd file upload begin, and reviewed Rulaine’s hardcopy record, located out of the commplex’s visual field.
According to his atypical dossier, Bannor Rulaine had gone to Dartmouth—gone, but never graduated. He found information imparted by drill instructors vastly preferable to that offered by professors. Instead of flunking out of the Fort Benning School for Wayward Boys, he had exceeded its expectations. His first posting had been to OCS, with more than a few of his trainers grumbling that the brass always ruined the best soldiers they produced by adorning their shoulders with shiny metal bars instead of honest fabric stripes.
Rulaine was already scanning the ops file. “So all five of us are to drop out of sight as soon as we’ve picked up the equipment here in Baltimore.”
“Yes, all of which is ‘defective’ Army issue. It is fully functional, of course.”
“Of course. What are you giving us, sir?”
“The lot. Everything you could want, except EVA gear; that’s as scarce as hen’s teeth right now. The cache—enough to support two fire teams for a month of extensive operations—has been sealed in a secure commercial container, waiting for you on the docks.”
Bannor nodded, then frowned. “Sir, I know I shouldn’t ask, but I have to anyway. Why all the cloak-and-dagger maneuvering?”
“A fair question. Here’s the frank answer: if there is a war scare, every official asset—material or human—could get commandeered. So I am precautionarily setting aside some cells of independent operatives—prepositioned and presupplied—that cannot be usurped by higher authorities later on.”
“I read you five by five, sir. Logically, you’ll want us to drop out of sight until you need us, so I presume you’ve set aside a specific location?”