Extinction: The Will of the Protectors Read online

  “No, Chief, I don’t. But I’d like to take Bloom if he isn’t needed here anymore.”

  Daria paused for the briefest of seconds and looked at Bloom. “Thanks for your help, buddy. Jeeves and I can take it from here.”

  “No problem, Doc.” Bloom stood and picked up his gear. “I’m all yours, Captain.”

  Emily was about to give Bloom a few tasks when Jeeves spoke up. “Captain, I have just finished running a war game scenario whose outcome you may be interested in.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Using the constantly updated information from the station’s system, along with the logic concepts we have been using to plan and execute our assault, I believe the warriors have retreated and are preparing to depart the station.”

  Emily didn’t doubt Jeeves’ accuracy in his assessment, so she didn’t ask him for a percentage of probability. The fact that he had run millions of possible scenarios by now and this is the only one he felt the need to bring to her attention meant that he thought it was the most probable of them all. She was still curious about a few things, though. “What factors brought you to this conclusion? And please leave out the minutia and just give it to me in broad strokes.”

  “Of course, Captain.” Jeeves now used only ten percent of his processing power to run war game scenarios, and that was just for fun. “Historically speaking, when new and extreme factors are introduced into a scenario, the warriors take on average approximately twenty seconds to adjust their operational tactics during a battle. If they have not made contact with their enemy when the new factors are made clear, they take eleven minutes, thirty-six seconds to adjust their tactics.

  “Ten minutes and forty-two seconds elapsed after Captain Fields provided you with the new tactical information about the Cherta plans in Sector 493. I received information through the station’s computers that doors were being opened in a sequence heading away from the command module. The most logical conclusion is they intercepted the communication and have decided, that when compared to ours, it is more important to disrupt the Cherta’s plans.”

  “Jeeves, you determined that the warriors couldn’t crack our communication encryption because of the cyphers our commlinks use. How would they have intercepted the information?” Bloom looked to Emily. “That’s one of the first things I did with Jeeves after we got back from that first mission. His security programming was top of the line at the time of his creation and we have no reason to believe the warriors have advanced much since then. Even with the upgrades I’ve given Jeeves, he still can’t crack our commlink encryption.”

  “I admit that I am perplexed by that piece of the puzzle.” Jeeves cocked his head in his horribly executed mimicry of human bewilderment. “However, that decreases the probability of my conclusion being correct by only point zero zero two percent.”

  Daria thought she might have the answer. She ran her hands underneath Schneps’ head and neck and then down his torso. “They have his commlink. It’s not here.”

  “Most of him isn’t.” For once, Bloom wasn’t being mirthful; he just stated the facts. “Maybe that’s why they took his skin. We know they’re sadistic bastards, but they didn’t have to take his skin after they removed it.”

  “Maybe they ate his skin.” Emily shuddered at her own thought.

  “It is not unheard of for the warriors to partake in the sharing of their enemies’ organs. Historical records from the empire have many examples of this type of behavior,” Jeeves added.

  “No, think about it.” On his visor, Bloom pulled up the mechanical specifications for the standard-issue military commlink. “One of the best features of the commlink is that it will never run out of juice as long as its wearer is still alive. It draws its charge from our bodies’ own energy output. That’s great for the end-user because it reduces the field maintenance needs of the commlink, and from a security point of view, it also means that once the user is KIA, the enemy can’t pick up a commlink and listen in on our chatter.

  “However, if they could remove his skin while the commlink was still attached, and keep a current running to it, it would never deactivate. And since each commlink is paired with its user, it wouldn’t deactivate itself as it’s programmed to do if it’s forcibly removed from the user.”

  Daria stood up. “With the torture tube’s advanced surgical abilities, they must have been able to skin Schneps in a way that allowed them to keep the commlink active. They might have skinned him partly for fun but I’m sure they also wanted to hide their tracks. They knew that once we found Schneps and examined him, if we saw that only his commlink and the surrounding skin was missing, we would assume they found a way to keep the commlink alive and intercept our communications. We wouldn’t openly use our commlinks after that.”

  “Bloom, Jeeves, get me a secure communication route to the fleet. We need to update them without the warriors listening in.” Emily turned to Wilks, who had already sidled up to the conversation once he saw the pow-wow in session. “Take Mitra and Vinci; meet up with Major Telfer’s element. Do what you can to intercept the warriors and delay their departure from the station.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Wilks grabbed his two breachers and headed out.

  “Jeeves, can you transmit false information over the commlink channels using our voices? And will it fool the warriors?” Emily had a plan.

  “Yes, Captain. They will not know that the transmissions are coming from a single source. If they had captured one of our relay units, they would be able to detect the deception as the relay shows unique identifiers for each incoming transmission. However, the commlinks cannot make a distinction as to where the transmission originates from.”

  “Good. I’ll leave the details to you, but I want you to come up with a scenario that you can play out for the warriors listening in on the commlink. I want them off balance and as disorganized as possible when Wilks’ team hits them.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Transmissions have already begun.”

  Chapter 8

  Seth felt his teeth mash together as the transport was hit with yet another enemy missile. “Whose idea was this again?”

  “Both of Captain Riley’s transports made it without incident,” Surgeon assured his commanding officer. “We should be fine.”

  “There are certain words and phrases that should be illegal to say in any combat situation.” Seth smiled. “Should be fine is at the top of that list, First Sergeant.”

  “Yes, sir.” Surgeon winked.

  “I’m still a little concerned that we haven’t been able to make radio contact with the team since our last transmission a few hours ago.” Joker cinched up his combat gear and made his final pre-deployment preparations.

  Seth was more worried on a personal level than a professional one. He was sure the team as a whole was doing fine, but he was worried that something might have happened to Emily.

  “Don’t be worried.” Seth put on his best command face. “There’s no way the entire team was wiped out so fast that none of them hadn’t been able to send out a message. And, we’re not detecting any jamming signals coming from either side. They must have enacted radio silence and they can’t answer us. Either way, we’re about to find out; we’ll have hard seal on the airlock in less than five.”

  Thirty Minutes Ago

  “Put suppressive fire on that doorway!” Emily directed the forward fireteam. “Bloom! On me! Get Mitra’s left side; I’ve got his right!”

  Jeeves had not found a way to circumvent the warriors from eavesdropping on the commlinks. As a result, the team had to fall back on good old-fashioned yelling. The combat made it hard to hear one another but at least the warriors didn’t know what was going on with the other side of the firefight.

  Emily pulled Mitra into an office off the main hallway they were defending. She immediately pulled out Mitra’s IFAK (Individual First Aid Kit) and went to work on the injuries. Standard operating procedure was to always use the soldier’s own kit on themselves and save yours for your ow
n injuries.

  Every soldier had their own IFAK that contained supplies to treat the most common and deadly injuries sustained in combat. There was seal-foam to stop bleeding or air loss from the torso. Four tourniquets, one for each appendage or to use two on a single appendage that was being difficult. And an airway device that a soldier could insert themselves if they thought they were about to go unconscious or they couldn’t keep their airway clear of blood and other fluids.

  Bloom gently pushed Emily aside. “I’ve got this, Captain.”

  Emily was the commanding officer and needed to be focused on the entire event and not one small portion of it. She didn’t have time to tend to her soldier’s wounds. “Thank you, Bloom. He actually doesn’t look too bad. I think he mostly got some wall splatter from a plasma round and hit his head on the way down.”

  “I’ll check it out and get Doc over here as soon as she’s done working on Wilks.”

  ~

  “I’m fine, godamnit!” Wilks protested.

  “Lay down and shut the fuck up, Gunny!” Daria was used to working with difficult patients: there was no such thing as a Marine who was an easy patient. Whether you wanted them to drink more water and stop picking at their blisters, or you were trying to patch up an amputated arm while the soldier kept shooting with his unaffected side—they were all difficult. But Wilks always seemed to Daria to be a greater pain in the ass than her usual patients.

  “Throw some seal-foam around it and let me get back to work.” Wilks referred to the plasma rifle that was unceremoniously shoved into his gut.

  When the firefight began, Wilks came around the corner and was confronted by a warrior who was just as surprised to see the human as Wilks was to see him. The warrior tried to fire his plasma rifle but it malfunctioned and never discharged. The warrior’s immediate action drills kicked in and he rammed the weapon forward and impaled Wilks on it. Wilks was just as fast, though, and his weapon didn’t malfunction—as was evident by the warrior’s head being opened in multiple places as Wilks’ gun spat three rounds downrange.

  Now Daria crouched over her friend to patch him up. “Look, you Neanderthal, I can’t just tape this thing down and send you back out there. I have to get it out of you.”

  “Hey, I may not be the corpsman here, Doc, but I distinctly recall in all of our self-aid classes being told to NEVER remove any impaled object.”

  “The only part of that sentence that mattered was that you are not the corpsman.”

  Daria held the plasma rifle still with one hand and probed the wound with the fingers of her other hand. She had sprayed a numbing agent into the wound but Wilks still had some sensation and his abdominal muscles flexed with the pain.

  “Look,” she added, “I don’t understand enough about their plasma rifles to know why it didn’t fire. Did he forget to charge it? Was it empty? Was it a circuit malfunction? Was it one of a million other things that I can’t even begin to fathom? I have no idea! Which means I have no idea what will or could happen if I leave this thing inside of you. Not to mention that trying to evac you from a combat zone with a near-meter long rifle protruding from your stomach will be impossible.”

  “So what you’re saying is, this thing is coming out now.” Wilks tried to smile through the pain.

  “I just need to make sure it isn’t hooked on anything before…” Daria didn’t finish her sentence before she yanked the weapon from Wilks’ body.

  “Oh shit! You bitch!” Wilks screamed and immediately regretted it. “Sorry, Doc. That was bad. Pretty much the worse thing ever.”

  “Don’t worry about it, you big baby.” Being the corpsman, Daria didn’t pull from Wilks’ IFAK; she pulled out her platoon medkit and grabbed supplies from its well-stocked and more advanced offerings.

  She had the same seal-foam that everyone else had, but her canisters also had an injection port that allowed her to add medications to the seal-foam before it was applied. Daria used that port now to add some more pain meds, a broad-spectrum antibiotic, and an experimental dopamine additive.

  The dopamine was chemically structured so that it couldn’t be absorbed through a blood vessel’s outer wall; it could only be absorbed by the inner layer of the blood vessel called the Tunica Media, the smooth muscle of a vessel that contracted or dilated to decrease or increase blood flow.

  Dopamine was used to cause vasoconstriction to increase blood pressure in a patient who was going into certain types of shock. As a rule, you didn’t want to add dopamine to a trauma patient because it would increase his blood pressure and make him bleed out faster.

  However, some doctor somewhere came up with this formula so the dopamine mixture only absorbed through the smooth muscle layer of the blood vessel, which meant only severed and damaged blood vessels would be affected and only those vessels would start to clamp down and thereby reduce the bleeding from those structures. Basically, it created micro-tourniquets for each of the hundreds or thousands of vessels that were damaged.

  With all of the medication added to the seal-foam, she applied it deep within the wound. The application nozzle let her get the foam sealant farther in than Wilks or any other patient would have liked, but it was necessary to make sure the deep bleeders were taken care of.

  “Oh, for the love of God!” Wilks bellowed.

  “Are you going to start calling me names again?” Daria finished spraying in the sealer and put a clear plastic adhesive over the entire wound to keep everything in.

  “I might. When I said that pulling out the rifle was the worst thing ever, I was wrong.”

  Wilks lost consciousness for the next twenty to thirty seconds. When he came to, Mitra was laying next him and Daria was gone. Bloom tended to both of them.

  “Hey, buddy. Take it easy now. Like it or not, you’re out of this fight for the time being.”

  “I’d like to argue that point with you, but I can’t find even a crappy excuse as to why you’re wrong.”

  “Good, I don’t have time to argue with you on this. I need you to watch Mitra so I can get back out there.”

  “Go. I can stay awake enough to take care of him. If he gets worse, I’ll call Doc.”

  Bloom gave Wilks’ shoulder a pat as he exited the room and entered the ongoing battle.

  ~

  Seth fired two rounds at the warrior that was down the hall and had his back to the team. Both rounds entered the warrior’s head and he dropped without ever knowing his life was over. Had there not been a gunfight raging on in the hallway, the warrior’s death would have been easily heard. But as it was, no one noticed the two suppressed rounds followed by the heavy body hitting the ground.

  Seth didn’t have to look back; he knew the rest of his team had spread out and taken the rooms behind him, clearing them as they went. He felt a bump-up from one of his men and a light touch on his shoulder. Seth waited until he felt the operator’s hand squeeze four times; Seth had four more operators behind him and ready to go.

  Seth’s team had been able to position themselves behind the warriors already engaged with Emily’s team. The problem was, they couldn’t use their commlinks to contact the other team as they were operating on the premise the commlinks had been compromised.

  Surgeon had come up with a simple plan to get around this issue. Once the team got into place and was ready to assault the warriors’ position from behind, they would transmit visual text to the other team’s visors: Take Cover! Joker wanted to add a ;) to the message but he was vetoed by Surgeon.

  Emily’s team would get the message and take cover as Seth’s team assaulted the warriors from behind their position. The crossfire danger would be eliminated and Seth’s team could go weapons-free without worrying about who was on the other end of the hallway.

  If the warriors had compromised the visors as well as the commlinks, then they would get the message also. However, it would not do them any good considering Seth’s team would be right behind them anyway.

  Now that Seth had four operators in the s
tack, he wouldn’t be getting any further bump-up updates, regardless of how many people joined the stack. Four was enough to move forward with the plan; anything more was just gravy, so the update would have been pointless.

  Seth transmitted the text to all visors within receiving range and counted to three. Seth rounded the corner with his team and found eight warriors shooting from and using cover in their fight against the team down the hallway. The warriors were not prepared to have a second full team push the assault from their unprotected back side.

  To say it was a slaughter would be an understatement. Blue blood and gore was splattered throughout the hallway and even on some of the operators. It was over quickly and without incident to Seth’s team.

  Some areas in the general vicinity still needed to be cleared, and Seth sent several of his men to do that. The Shirka commando unit had come along for the ride and was currently hunting all of the remaining warriors on the station.

  “Captain Riley,” Seth called down the hallway.

  Emily emerged from cover. A gash somewhere on her head slowly sent blood down her face and dripped off her chin. “Captain Fields, thanks for coming to our rescue.”

  Emily was trying to be lighthearted, but her own comment stung her pride more than it should have.

  “Your rescue?” Seth played it off. “Are you kidding? You guys had this. We just had to help you finish it faster so we could get on our way to our updated objective.”

  Daria stepped forward. “Thanks, Captain. Is my husband with you?”

  “Sure is, Doc. He’s leading the rest of the guys in a sweep-n-clear.”

  “Okay.” Daria wanted to see her husband but knew there were more important things to deal with right now. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to steal Reaper from you. I need help with a few patients who are stable but have severe injuries.”

  “Of course. I’ll send him up to you. Is it safe to use our commlinks? We weren’t sure why your team went silent so we followed suit until we could figure out why.”