Previous Chapter

“Yancey, report,” Lang snapped, grabbing Keys’ wrist as he raised his plasma rifle. “What’s your situation?”

“Looks like a decontamination room,” Yancey said. “There’s an exit opposite where we came in. Oh, and now they’re pumping something into the chamber through the vents and it doesn’t look like any decontamination foam or similar substance I’ve ever seen.”

Lang waved his team away from the door. “Blast your way back out through to us, target the hinges on the door and you should be able to get past it in no time.”

“Not sure we should expose you guys to this stuff.”

“That was an order, Harry. We’re clear of the door, start melting.”

The door shook from a series of impacts then the hinges on the door blew out in melted chunks that spattered across the floor in glowing puddles. Then the door latch did the same. Harry kicked down the door and hustled out with Keys just behind, both men coughing as a wave of smog or mist followed them out. Yancey and Priss pulled the two of them away to either side while Lang and Ramone opened fire through the doorway, slinging plasma through the decontamination room towards its other door until they heard a loud thud.

Whatever chemical the Earthlings had pumped through the vents was much heavier than the air and it drifted out among them at ankle height. Lang eyed it, distrustful, but it didn’t have the telltale glitter of active nanotech. Besides, Yancey hadn’t mentioned anything on the EMGs so it couldn’t have an active mag field feeding it power anyways. “Switch to internal air supply.”

“Sarge?” Ramone sounded surprised. “We’ve only got two hours air on hand and there’s no danger of us breathing this stuff. Are you sure you want to use it up now?”

“It’s just a precaution,” Lang said. “If we wind up wasting the canned air you can go back to get more, okay?”

“If you say so.”

He did, and they all paused for a moment to pull up the mouthpiece from its hiding place in their collars, activate the airflow and seal the whole thing around their mouths. The process took all of ten or twelve seconds. “All right,” Lang said, his voice now muffled by the mouthpiece and backed by the quiet hissing of air, “new formation. Keys, Ramone, take point. Yancey, keep your eyes glued to the EMG scans and everyone else keep your eyes moving. A decontamination chamber comes before a secured area. They’ll probably have some kind of guards or at least surveillance in play so be prepared to respond to just about anything.”

“Lang, you might want to have a look at this.” Priss was kneeling by the open doorway and poking at the mist with her knife. Only now it had begun hardening into a strange substance that looked fluffy to the naked eye but gave very little when the flat of the metal blade tapped against it. Even a quick jab failed to do any serious damage to it. “Whatever this gunk is, it’s fast acting and pretty tough.”

Lang eyed the door, which was still dispersing a slow moving cloud of the stuff. “That’s an interesting wrinkle. Anyone know what it is?”

“Looks like some kind of insulation spray foam,” Ramone said, grabbing a handful of the stuff in his left hand and kneading it back and forth. “Yeah, it feels a lot like the kinds of stuff we had onboard during the Departure era. My gramps had a house built with this. It’s really fast acting, Sarge, and it’s already starting to set. We’ve got a good chance of getting stuck if we try to go through this now.”

“Did you spot the vents?” Lang asked. “We could plug them up and go.”

“Negative, Sarge.” Ramone patted his rifle. “These are heat guns and that’s insulation, the one thing basically exists to get in the way of the other. We can shoot into it, sure, but it’s gonna take a lot of time. It’d be faster to just go around, though not really safer.”

“Why would it be unsafe?” Priss asked.

“We don’t have plans for this place,” Yancey said, “and standard doctrine in a gravity bound structure is to avoid taking out walls in case there’s something load bearing in there. Plus we don’t have the right tools for it. That means we’d probably have to do even more damage to the overall structure in order to effect a usable breach.”

“Damn.” Lang knocked his helmet against the wall once, trying to figure out how to get around the situation without putting the whole team in danger. “Okay, what options do we have other than dragging the roof down on us?”

“The admin offices may connect to the control center, we could try that,” Priss suggested.

“Any route in or out of the control center is going to be behind a decontamination room given the safety protocols and era of construction,” Keys said. “We could try going in from the reactor chamber. There should be a reinforced window we could try to breach although that will take a lot of time as well. It’s supposed to withstand reactor accidents, after all.”

“The roof.”

All eyes turned to Harry. Lang raised an eyebrow. “Go on.”

“This is an industrial facility designed to resist accidents from the inside, not a secure military facility designed to withstand attacks from the outside.” Harry pointed back towards the hallway they’d entered through. “There is a window in the admin room. We go out and up to the roof then breach it once we’re past this point and continue as normal. No risk of hitting anything load bearing. Much faster than running through the bottom floor and getting lost or trying to breach a reinforced plexiglass window.”

“That’s the best idea I’ve heard so far, unless anyone else has a stroke of genius that’s what we’re going with.” Lang spun around on his heel. The rest of the squad fell in behind him, double timing back through the locker room and hallway and into the empty admin offices.

Getting to the roof proved more difficult than they had originally anticipated. The LA Fusion Plant was not constructed with magboot maneuvering in mind, which wasn’t a surprise given the time and place it was built but did make the squad’s best climbing tool useless. They wound up locking their exoskeleton’s into a long chain to secure Keys in place as he carefully climbed the six meters from the window to the roof. Once in place he clamped down and pulled them up. It was the most uncomfortable human daisychain maneuver Lang had ever done in his life.

Still, ten minutes later they were all safely on the roof, dusting themselves off as they took stock of their situation. Lang shook himself off and said, “It may have been safer to just blast through a wall and risk bringing down the roof.”

“That’s your monkey brain talking, Sarge,” Keys said.

“Nah, my monkey brain is fine, it’s wired for high places. My human brain doesn’t like hanging out in thin air with no engines of my own.”

“The exo’s servos have an 0.12% failure rate in high tension locking situations, statistically speaking we were in no danger whatsoever.” Harry patted his exoskeleton in contentment. “We can get back down this way, too, if we have to.”

“Let’s not have to.” Lang spun on his heel until he spotted the marker his AI had left inside the building. It was a short run from the side of the building back to that spot and an even shorter matter to go a few more steps and get past the decontamination room. Then they formed a circle about three meters wide and hit the roof with a barrage of super heated plasma. It wasn’t as smooth a process as Lang had hoped.

The roof wasn’t particularly tough, all things considered. It was concrete reinforced with iron rebar, pretty typical for a two hundred year old Earth building and sturdy enough when faced with weather or the like but not really designed to stand up to plasma weapons. That said, a plasma rifle wasn’t really designed to cut through stone, either. It took almost a hundred rounds of fire to dig a ten inch wide, six inch deep divot into the roof.

Then they took a plasma grenade with some spray adhesive and stuck the grenade in the hole. Then they set it off. In most cases a plasma grenade caused damage by its sudden change in heat, which kept deadly shrapnel to a minimum. When it was buried in a concrete roof the sudden temperature change caused catastrophic cracking through the concrete and liquefied the rebar. While most of the rubble fell straight down a few chips did go flying and leave scratches on their armored exos.

After giving the rubble a five count to begin cooling Lang waved his squad forward. For the second time that day they rushed into pandemonium. The grenade opened a hole in the roof about four feet wide and shaped like a kidney bean; not the ideal shape for quick entry but a valid method nonetheless. All six of them piled through the gap and landed in the rubble in rapid succession. Lang and Priss fumbled the landing a tad. Although their exos had internal self-balancing gyroscopes to keep them more or less upright and powered servos to absorb the shock of landing neither one of them had worn the gear long enough to roll with the impact successfully.

Yancey landed like ten foot drops were an every day task, the others were almost as graceful. Unfortunately Lang didn’t have the time to appreciate the other’s performance as the section of roof they’d entered through had been right over the command room’s antechamber. Several work stations were crumpled and sparking underneath the rubble and half a dozen Earthlings were playing fire extinguishers over the rubble.

When the first of the spacers landed the Earthlings recoiled. Most of them froze, staring at the six of them in astonishment, while Harry and Yancey snapped their rifles to ready. For a long moment, no one moved. However that wasn’t surprising to Lang, given what he’d already seen he suspected that even the very primal instinct to hold up empty hands in surrender had gone out of common use. He held up a hand, signaling they should hold their fire.

“I’m Sergeant Martin Langley, of the Copernican Spacer Corps.” He took a few steps forward, letting his own plasma rifle hang across his chest on his carry strap as he held his hands open in a placating movement. “If you don’t wish to fight we will accept your surrender. Just put your hands up on top of your head and we can end hostilities with just that.”

Most of the Earthlings turned to look at a woman in the sharp cornered, brightly colored clothing Lang had come to recognize as the region’s standard business dress. She was a little short and her chestnut hair was clipped close to her skull but there was no mistaking her feminine figure or the way the other’s deferred to her. This was the woman in charge. Lang turned his full attention to her and said, “I’m under orders to secure this power plant, ma’am, and I’d be happy to do that with as little additional violence as possible. However, one way or another, we’re taking over this command center.”

The woman sighed and began to raise her hands. Lang felt himself beginning to smile, glad to have the facility secured at last, when a wave of white foam blasted over his faceplate and blinded him. It happened so fast he wasn’t even sure what was going on. The armored gloves of his exoskeleton were fine for most tool using purposes but they weren’t the best thing for wiping off a piece of clear plastic without smearing it. By the time he got his visibility back the shouting and shooting had already started.

“What happened?” He demanded, wiping vigorously with both hands as the command center came back into view. It looked like one of the Earthlings had disappeared and the others had their hands on their heads as they’d been instructed.

“One of them hit you and Yancey with the fire extinguisher spray,” Harry said. He’d moved across the room to another door which he was looking out of. The ring of plasma pockmarks around the door testified to what the others had been shooting at. “Then he made a break for it.”

Lang looked back at the woman in charge. “What was that?”

“I apologize,” the woman said, her tone far sterner than you might expect from an apology. “Mr. Vesper is an extremely unpredictable individual due to his very difficult personal circumstances.”

“Don’t you stick the unpredictable people in tanks?” Ramone asked.

“It’s called Shutdown, and yes, we do. We removed him in order to work on the Light of Mars project.” The woman said it as if it should be obvious.

“Of course,” Ramone said. “The Light of Mars. Why didn’t I think of that?”

Priss glanced at Lang then back at the woman. “Is that the nanotechnology field you’ve been putting up over the city?”

The Earthling tilted her head as if considering something. “Yes. You didn’t know?”

“Fuck.” Lang spun to point at Yancey, Ramone and Keys. “You three stay here, lock down the command center and contact the Captain. Let her know we’re trying to run down one of the people who created the disassembler field. Priss, Harry, with me. Harry, which way did that asshole go?”

“Just follow me, Sarge.” The three of them pounded out of the the room and deeper into the facility.