Chapter Nine

Hayden’s World, Subcontinent

Cassius watched as the inspectors made their way through the small city, really more of a town at this point if he were honest, that Sorilla’s mobile fabricators had been working on.

The rugged little machines had been acquired from a defunct mining operation that the invasion had pushed into total bankruptcy, leaving their equipment floating around a distant and useless planet, obsolete and of far more cost to ship back to Earth than they were worth to the mining consortium now that the Ares facility had been abandoned.

He wasn’t sure how she’d done it, but Sorilla had cajoled some shipping space from a Captain she knew and gotten them trans-shipped to Hayden instead of left for scrap. Most of the gear he saw on her little parcel of land had a similar story behind it, from the weapons to the vehicles.

War had a funny way of doing that, he supposed.

Cassius himself remembered bulk sales of rifles out of certain countries back on earth, where you just pulled as many weapons as you wanted from a small mountain of them, tossed them on a scale, and paid by the pound.

Military endeavors weren’t, generally, conducted with the efficiencies of making a profit in mind. You did what you had to do, never minding the cost, because it would be far more expensive to lose. When the war was over, however, the bean counters came rushing back in to remind you that it cost a hell of a lot of money just to move the equipment a soldier needed to where he needed it, and there were companies already chomping at the bit to offer to replace all of it for bulk discounts anyway.

More than one fortune had been made just by cleaning up after the victor left the battlefield.

“Ah, Mr. Aida.”

Cassius looked up, nodding to the man who was approaching. He was an officious sort. Cassius didn’t much like dealing with his type, but he wasn’t intentionally annoying at least.

“Mr. Grenada,” Cassius said. “I trust everything is to specification?”

“And beyond,” Pierre Grenada said dryly. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen so many places so massively overbuilt. This little city will be here in five thousand years, assuming it’s not struck by a meteor or some other insanity.”

That was less unlikely than it had been a few years ago, Cassius reflected idly while outwardly he merely nodded.

“Sorilla isn’t the type to skimp, and as I understand it the lifetime cost of building like this is far lower,” Cassius shrugged.

“It certainly is. However, most buildings these days are built by contractors,” Grenada said casually. “And they aren’t concerned with upkeep, since they wash their hands of the building once it’s been completed. Few owners know, and fewer care, since the majority intend to work the building for a few years, couple decades at most, before selling it off. This kind of thinking requires a certain expectancy that you’ll still own the buildings in a century. Not many plan like that.”

“True, and more’s the pity,” Cassius sighed.

The world had come a long way from the early days of disposable living, but while there were many improvements in that regard, most of them were more in ameliorating the damage of disposables rather than simply stop disposing of things. He still owned and used the tools his father had left him, and many of those had been purchased originally by his great grandfather.

Disposable only meant cheaper if you didn’t account for the price over time, but no one really seemed to understand that…

Or care.

“Still,” He said aloud. “I presume that the facilities pass inspection?”

Grenada nodded, “Oh certainly. I expect that there will be some infrastructure requirements that haven’t yet been met, but from what I can tell the designs were implemented specifically to account for those.”

“Oh?”

“Power and communication, mostly, possibly utilities…” Grenada said. “The buildings are properly plumbed to accept all of the above, and water, power, and network communications have already been added…”

“What else would there be?” Cassius found himself somewhat curious despite himself.

“Given that the current contract is intended for an alien habitation? I am quite certain I have no idea,” Grenada admitted.

“Ah.”

Yes, Cassius admitted to himself, that is a point.

“Well let me know if there are any specific requests,” He said. “I will see to it that they’re implemented.”

“I will, though no doubt that will come down through either the Colony or SOLCOM,” Grenada said. “Possibly either or both depending on the nature of the request.”

The officious man laughed softly, “Speaking as a bureaucrat myself, sometimes even I don’t understand how decisions are made and communicated.”

Cassius barked in surprised laughter at the confession, “That puts you one up on me, Mr. Grenada. I’ve never understood how decisions are made by bureaucracies.”

*****

Orkhana

Sienele scowled, annoyed by the sudden drift in the situation.

“Where are the Sentinel and the Colonel?” He growled in a low tone, pushing in to speak to the other Sentinels.

He did not want some incident blowing up in his face while an investigation of this magnitude was being conducted. Things would be sensitive enough once word got out that someone was using Alliance facilities to construct traceless weapons grade materials. The Colonel’s presence alone was adding anti-matter to the flames, and now both she and an experienced Sentinel had gone off on their own?

It was clear they were trying to kill him with an aneurysm.

“Uncertain, Envoy,” The Sentinel said, his tone respectful on the surface but Sienele could easily hear the ‘I could kill you with a finger’ in the undertone.

He ignored it. That was just how Lucians spoke to, well, pretty much everyone.

Not so much the Colonel, His thoughts whispered to him. Not Kriss, at least. Nor those that trust him.

That brought up a whole host of other issues he expected to become problems in the future, but at least the Lucians were simple beasts. Respecting the humans was fine for them, even if he would discourage it among many other Alliance species. For most, respecting and liking someone meant you were less inclined to fight them… for Lucians? It rather worked the other way around.

It made handling them a little different than most, but quite a bit easier from his point of view. As long as the enemy was a threat, you could always count on a Lucian being up to the challenge of taking them on… and if the enemy wasn’t a threat, well you hardly needed the Sentinels in that case, now did you?

At the moment, however, he had a Sentinel running around with an enemy Asymmetrical Warfare specialist, investigating what was almost certainly a clandestine move by one of the Alliance’s member species to undermine the Alliance.

What could possibly go wrong with that scenario?

When she had asked to finish the investigation, despite the objections of the human military, he’d accepted for several reasons. Not the least of which was that he was counting on learning more from her about human military thinking, but also that there was a certain coup to being able to tell his superiors that he had one of the Human’s war heroes working under him.

It was a risk, however, because if it blew up in his face… it was really going to blow up in his face.

 “Find them,” He ordered. “And either tell them to find me, or return and inform me as to their location… and activities.”

“Of course, Envoy,” The Sentinel said, with that same familiar tone in his voice.

Sienele ignored, turning his back on the Sentinel, and stalking back to his task.

*****

The Commander finished organizing his forces, eyes flickering constantly to the stretch of corridor they were preparing to defend. The sound of fighting from up ahead had completely ended and they were now uncertainly waiting for contact, either from the remaining team or the enemy.

He was betting on the enemy.

A slight vibration on his personal comm caught his attention briefly, but he ignored it at first. Until he noticed that everyone else was halfway in the motion of reaching for their own systems, something that struck him as… wrong.

His soldiers had personal comms, but they were on mission and locked out to all non-essential communications. In fact, now that he thought about it, if a communication was important enough to be sent through to him, he should have received it directly, not been apprized by a vibration warning.

He pulled his comm out, flipping it open with a casual twist of his appendage, and blinked in first confusion, then consternation, as he saw an image of the enemy soldier they were currently tracking appear on it.

Species… Human, Affiliation SOLCOM? I’ve never heard of that group, The Commander thought, confused. Was it an Alliance special operations unit?

Further down was the real shocking bit, however, and he had to read it twice.

Reward for capture/Death… substantial? A bounty sheet? Who sent…?

The Commander’s thoughts trailed off as he read the senders tag and realized that it was a direct communique from the Saviors. A sharp look around his unit made it clear that several of the others had opened their messages and had received the same thing and were sharing it around with the rest.

This is…

He steeled himself, not wanting to think badly of the saviors, but it was not an intelligent move, at least not sending that message in the midst of preparations for an actual battle. Now he was going to have to deal with at least some of his men becoming reckless in their attempt to claim a rather nebulous reward.

Not that he entirely blamed them. Honestly, any direct reward from the saviors would be an immense cachet within Sirhan society. Even he, himself, was not entirely free from that temptation. However, he had a task to accomplish at the moment, and this was not helping.

“Comms down,” He growled, closing his own and securing it. “Yes, I saw what was written, and yes I see who sent it. Right now, I do not care! I will personally shoot anyone who leaps the bridge and reveals our position to the enemy. Dream about rewards on your own time, right now you all belong to me.”

He glowered at them until they settled, then quietly sighed as he got back into position himself.

Damn fool thing to send.

*****

Sorilla was again riding the incredible rush of interfacing with the Ross map through her implants, letting the accelerometers tell her brain the shape of the world around her while her brain automatically decoded the information into something useable to her.

Had she tried this shortly after gaining the new implant suite, Sorilla rather thought it would have crippled her with motion sickness. Even now there was a hint of nausea in the background, threatening to emerge, but she had long since gotten used to worse and simply pushed it down as she worked.

There was another ambush up ahead, she could feel the charges from their Ross issued weapons building. Her sense of gravity was, at that point, sufficient enough to identify the weapon types and their positions with relative ease.

The enemy had an eighteen-man squad, equipped with light to medium Ross created Pulse weapons. More than enough to put some serious hurt on anything short of a heavy main battle tank, and even that would take some damage putting them down.

They also weren’t unaware that she was aware of them, unlike the last bunch.

That is going to make this… tricky.

Flipping an ambush, when you know it’s there, but the enemy doesn’t know you know, that was not only possible it was practically one of the hallmarks of infantry legend. Doing the same when the enemy was fully aware that you knew they were waiting? That got a lot harder, since they would generally be on alert and less prone to the fatal flaw of assuming that everything was in hand.

Sorilla paused at the corner of the corridor that led to the ambush, gauging the distance. She could feel the weapons roughly ten meters or so away, which fit with the layout of the corridors as she had come to know them. That meant that the enemy likely had the hallway covered and to get to them, she would have to cross a ten meter long kill box.

Feasible, perhaps, but not what she’d call good odds even if she had a solid squad with her.

Unfortunately, the Alliance wasn’t the sort to build convenient person-sized air conditioning vents into their facilities, nor did they have drop ceilings… though she’d actually tried to hide in a drop ceiling once, it hadn’t gone well. So even if the Alliance were the sorts for that, Sorilla couldn’t see herself trying to sneak through them.

The construction of the facility was not as solid as it might seem, however.

Much of the framework was monolithic, and incredibly strong if she was reading the information correctly through the Ross projection, but apparently the Alliance liked modular and shiftable interior layouts. For that reason, the walls were much thinner anywhere that wasn’t load bearing, and built on what she was interpreting as air bearings or perhaps a mag-lev suspension device so they could be moved.

Sorilla fell back from the corner, armor shod hands brushing along the wall as she considered her options briefly before making a decision.

Her power enhanced punch shattered the concrete and blew through the wall to the other side with an ease that surprised her despite knowing the nature of the construction. It only took a few moments after that to kick out enough of a space for her to slip through into the room beyond.

It was unused storage as best she could tell, thick layers of dust covered old equipment of some type she didn’t recognize as she walked through to the other side and came to a stop in front of the far wall.

She blinked her eyes, activating the infra-red options in her implants and helmet HUD.

It didn’t let her see through walls exactly. It wasn’t like the movies, but she could see a blob of heat near the corner where a hand was pressed up against the wall on the other side… a hand or some other appendage, for lack of better terminology. Another blob exposed the body of a kneeling soldier.

Sorilla smiled tersely under her mask and stepped up to the wall.

*****

The Commander frowned as he heard an odd sound from down the hall.

More fighting? No, that wasn’t weapons fire.

Several moments later he was still trying to puzzle it out as they waited in their ambush position, but nothing was coming to mind. With no repeats, however, he put it from his thoughts and refocused on the situation at hand.

He barely had the time to finish that thought when a sharp crack startled everyone around him. A weapon went off though he was certain that was one of his own soldiers firing from the surprise, and he looked around trying to figure out what happened.

One of the lead elements was on the ground, dead or unconscious, with a large hole in the wall where he’d been standing the only sign of an attack.

He hesitated a second longer, trying to figure out what had just happened, but it was a second too much.

Another sharp crackle of breaking cement snapped the air as two more holes were torn next to another of his soldiers and a pair of armor shod arms reached through and… just pulled the man back through the wall in an instant of violence.

“Back from the wall! Cover the wall!” He ordered, shifting his aiming position as he spoke.

A roar of automatic fire from the other side of the wall was the only thing he heard in response to that order even as the Commander returned that fire with prejudice.

In another instant of violence, the corridor was filed with smoke, dust, and the warping of local spacetime as a vicious exchange of fire ensued.

*****

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