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Chapter 9 - Infiltration - Part 2
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Rat-ta-ta-ta-ta-- Thud
Our body armour has an inbuilt synchronised clock, handheld devices are prohibited, if we fall, they could be hacked and give info to our enemy, so archaic watches are used. Mine tells me it's already been seventeen minutes; far too much time is passing. Still, at last, we've found the place we needed.
The body keeps squelching. It is a disgusting, inhuman sound, yet as I drag it across the floor, coating the tiles in murky brown-red, the corpse squelches.
We've taken down many of their defenders. Some on our side have been hurt too, though I'm not even sure who anymore. This room is bigger than the rest. It was hard to capture.
I killed a man.
The man wasn't a soldier; he wore a labcoat – Do scientists count as soldiers under these circumstances? 'You can justify anything if you try hard enough...'
We'd followed after the assault group too fast. The man had been hiding by the door, and he leapt towards Chief Gros. I panicked and acted on instinct all at once, dropping my SMG like a moron but drawing my sidearm, my pistol, just as fast.
Rat-ta-ta, Rat-ta-ta, Rat-ta-ta
––––
Thud.
I pulled the trigger three times. The semi-automatic pistol let forth three small bursts, nine bullets. The first hit the man square in the head, killing him. As he fell, the second burst hit his neck, blood pouring out like a fountain, the final burst dully thudding off his shoulder blade before he hit the floor.
Gros thanked me, an entirely unexpected occurrence after last night. Was that my reward for slaying a fellow human, the gratitude of a boss I have mixed feelings about at best? Is that all this scientist, whose voice I’d never heard, whose name I’d never know, is that all his life was worth?
Johnny was immediately set to work accessing the terminals in this long rectangular room while others took to guarding the doors. I and Mr Richard moved the bodies out of the way, laying them against the back wall. A janitor cleaning up the dead, is there an irony to that? I don't find it funny if there is.
The man I killed is amongst the corpses. The tile floor is stained red all over. We'll have to be careful not to slip, I suppose…
“See, if you just reverse the polarity of the sequence, you get the break, neat, right? Easiest one yet!” Says the nervously jumpy voice of Johnny. She isn't talking to anyone in particular; rather, she’s been rambling for a while now, perhaps her own coping mechanism – I'm pretty sure she has gunned a man down at this point too – red flecks of drying blood certainly stain the ends of her normally silky blond hair.
“Kris, memory Drive B,” Gros calls to me. I walk over and hand the drive to Johnny, who doesn't break eye contact with the computer screens for a second. There’s a dozen of them lining the length of the wall. This room seems to be a hub office of sorts, perfect for us.
Strewn across the counter is a menagerie of drives and cables as Johnny takes down as much data and breaks through as many firewalls as possible. She’s been ordered to leave the local data to last, so the couple dozen filled drives stacked up are purely what’s been taken from the servers, a seriously impressive amount of data.
During her ramblings, Johnny actually explained that on her second month aboard the Caravel, she’d nearly been charged by Lt Vitka with treason. From childhood – the girl only a couple years my senior, with her floppy hair, freckled cheeks and currently rather wild-looking, bespectacled eyes – had always loved machines and coding. This love had led her to casually hack the Caravel's central computer for fun in her off time. Luckily Gros had vouched for her, apparently claiming she was too stupid to be a spy.
After that, Johnny was sent on a course for two months and returned as the Caravel’s official tech expert – however, this is the first time that speciality had been deployed quite like this – or, at least, so she rambles.
As I fish out another drive to hand to her, I finally got a look at what this office is above. The computers, half of which are currently streaming information only Johnny could hope to decipher and keep up with, are at about chest height. Above them are windows all the way up to the ceiling, and the view through the windows is chilling.
A cavernous room many times larger than the Caravel's hangar, larger than the most extensive sports fields. Filling it are six rows of roughly ten machines apiece. The row nearest us is clearly the earliest stage, the internals and skeleton of a mecha. A row back has a completed frame and more internals, another and the familiar grey-armour plating is being added. A fourth row gives the machine a head; mechanics all know that the head unit is the most technically complex part after the engine, so it having its own stage makes sense.
The fifth row seems to be external checks and thrusters. The final row looks almost complete.
Sixty-odd Casnels lay before me in various stages of progress. The largest number of them ever gathered in history. It's both perfect and terrifying; great that Gros is getting to see this in such precise detail and that Johnny can collect so much data – but the sight of it, of a mass-production line of Casnel, a place that can potentially repeat this process – is almost enough to make me collapse on the spot.
“They're trying to limit our view, but they're way too slow,” Gros grumbles beside me.
Indeed, the people down there, the little black and white suited ants, are hurriedly putting out lights and even throwing blankets over some components, but it’s clear Gros has already seen and photographed most of it. They had tried remotely lowering the window shutter, but Johnny soon had them back up, and Vitka wedged a metal pole through the window as a physical barrier for good measure.
Johnny continues to ramble. I keep handing her new memory drives, and the data on the monitors keeps whizzing by. The air is tense as we await the next assault. The enemy could overwhelm us if we remain in this spot for much longer. A sudden cry from Gros breaks the ice a little, though not for long; “Freeze that screen there, lass!”
Johnny does as she's told without slowing down her data gathering. One of the monitors she hadn't been using flashes to life, and Gros quickly begins studying it. I glance over, too.
The screen is filled with sketches, diagrams and debates on some sort of weapon. I'd go as far as to guess it has been a rocky development, slower than the grey knights and perhaps the reason why the ones we fought before had no ranged weapons.
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The theme of all the sketches is long barrel sleek box tubes. Some designs have two of these at the mech’s waist, and others have a larger gun with a length as tall as the mech is. One design has two barrels on the mech’s shoulders and a set of golden wings behind for collecting solar energy.
The design they seem to have settled on is the most streamlined, a single barrel attached to the Casnel's back – Able to move to its hips or shoulder, looking almost like a tail.
Aside from the aesthetic, however, it’s the numbers that have Gros riled. The output of this gun would be higher than any rifle I've ever seen, more potent than a ship's cannon by far. It also seems to fire in a short burst, a tidal wave of superheated energy. Theoretically, this thing could swing in a semi-circle to take out multiple warships at once…
“What would be the point of such absurd power...” I mumble.
Gros is quick to answer, “Oh that’s easy, those scumbags! What is the reason Remembrance has been able to rebuild despite us nearly being wiped out twice in the last decade? Resources: Abhaile is covered in valuable metals, so TSU has always hesitated to shell us from low orbit. But with this, they could accurately sink ships and destroy our bases without ever damaging the mines or manufacturing equipment.”
Vitka, who has moved over to us to observe the screen too, grimly continues Gros’s' explanation, “Then they could just move in, using our very own facilities to start mining and recouping the financial costs of this project. If the Grand Weapon was TSU's sledgehammer, then this time, they have chosen a much more precise weapon of mass destruction.”
I start to feel the true weight of this ungodly weapon. I imagine the ashen wastelands of Remembrance, our headquarters sitting atop the Garzey-Plain, a defence fleet of proud ships above it, and the sea of wrecks surrounding it on all sides. It is a cold, frigid home with no colour or natural life – But it is still all we have left.
I imagine seventy Cansels pointing these long barrel cannons at that home and the explosion as fleet and base alike are atomised in a single instant.
“B-but if we tell her Ladyship, the Supreme Commander will stop this, right?”
Vitka lays a hand on my padded shoulder kindly, “Of course, Kris, and we have the documents now. We can build countermeasures of our own. For now, our duty is to escape here with this intel.”
“R-ight, right. Roger Sir.” I salute back, doing my best to be brave as I look up at the tall man, and yet looking at him, I can’t quite picture the heroic voice of Templar anymore, but rather someone with a terrible amount of blood on their hands.
“Errr, Lieutenant, these firewalls are getting tighter, and I'm pretty sure they have a whole team of guys somewhere trying to lock me out,” Johnny says to my side, snapping me of my conflicted thoughts, having seized her rambling while the rest of us were talking.
“Understood. Good work, petty officer. Begin taking the data local to the computers here and make ready to move out. Everyone else, check your ammunition. We head for sector D3, and then we leave. Understood?” Vitka issues to each of us in turn, his voice calm and clear – The voice of an experienced leader, right?
“Sir!” A small chorus quickly echoes back. Before long, Johnny and I are stowing away all the filled memory drives, and our infiltration team is on the move again.
****
Rat-tat-tat-t--- Squelch
We've made it to another corner of the base. We're inside a somewhat cramped generator room, filled mainly by the massive yellow power cells that provide some of this place's power supply.
The fighting has gotten much worse; Johnny's left arm is limp at her side, someone else took a glancing blow to their helmet, and their forehead is dripping blood grimly. Someone else is dead, but I'm not sure who, I don't think it was someone I'd gotten to know yet... We had to leave their body behind, only taking their ammo and explosives.
Right now, the assault group and Gros are rigging this room full of plastic explosives. The hope being that the explosion will be enough to at least damage the nearby factory floor we saw earlier, though of course, most of those in-progress grey knights will probably take little more than a scratch from such an explosion. Still, destroying the equipment of this place should slow them down.
Johnny and I are guarding the single door. I've done my best to set her limp arm. She thanks me, but the blood is already beginning to stain the bandage. I wish I'd paid more attention in first aid demonstrations.
I've killed a second man, another enemy soldier whose face, voice and name I don’t and probably won't ever know.
“Chief Mechanic?” Vitka calls from the far side of the room.
“All good here, we're done,” Gros shouts back. Soon, the nine-- eight of us reassembled at the doorway, weapons checked, and wounds bandaged as best as possible.
“I will now radio for exfiltration. We move immediately after that, understood?” Our leader says brusquely, everyone nods. Once the radio is used, our position will be pinpointed, and no doubt the transmission will be intercepted: But not knowing where our escape is makes this a necessary evil.
“Core-Base, this is Core-Top, requesting evac.”
There is a long, troubling moment of silence before a static-riddled reply comes; “Copy, so ye're still alive, good. Head for--” A loud explosion echoes over the line before the Captain begins speaking again, “Head for the dome's centre, there is some sort of giant open space here; you'll find us from there.”
Vitka's impassive face takes on a worried colour, “Copy, Ma'am. Your status Core-Base?”
Another dangerously long pause, “Just hurry up, over and out.”
There are some grim expressions all around, but we have no time to hesitate or worry about the others.
Like Vitka ordered, we immediately get moving again, heading for the centre of the dome, a strange place for the Caravel to have ended up all considered, but we can question that once we get there.
“Ammo is low, sir, four mags left,” Mr Richard calls over to Vitka as we round another corner.
“That’s fine, this corridor should lead us to the point--”
We're in a strange passageway this time, less metal, more glass. It is almost like a greenhouse, and outside can be seen a large field of sorts – looking straight up shows the roof of the dome high above – and crashing through the glass, generating an outrageously loud sound of shattering, comes a giant blue bird-man.
You can forget how loud sound is living in space, where every battle is silent other than the communication channels of the pilots. The sound as the walls and roof of the tunnel collapse and the backside of a Mleue slams into the ground just a short distance in front of us is almost deafening.
The next sound beats even that, nearly ruptures my eardrums – a sword that towers as large as a house in front of us, glowing red, its individual blades spin like a chainsaw – the noise is horrendous as this blade lurches down and cuts into the fallen Mleue's chest. The greasy smell as hydraulic fluids pour out of the newly cut wound is overwhelming.
I look up to see the victor, standing above the fallen Mleue, pulling free its blade. Twenty metres of massive white knight painted a sloppy mix of grey paint and brown hydraulic oil.
Before the Caravel, it seems we've instead found Templar.
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