From the control room remains, Captain Yossef Braun Kamirov of the Martian Techno-Military Police peered into the huge distillation plant over a charred console.
A bamboo forest of rusted steel pipes anarchically lined below. Crooked rod rose towards the half-collapsed concrete ceiling under Uranus’ brilliant blue mantle and the distant stars. From up there, cobalt particles of ice and cosmic dust sometimes twirled, conglomerated into strange coin-sized Möbius loops.
Some of the gravitational strangles landed on Braun’s shoulder. He cleared them before they could gradually coat his dark armor. They crumbled, and gently slid, like him, into the snow-covered floor. The officer rested his back against the old console. Cleaning his narrow Spartan visor, he stared further back at Sergeant Wilson Bluford.
Kneeled among the rubble, the Marine NCO angrily adjusted the controls of the orbital radio with his gloved fingertips. Judging by his jerky movements, multiplied by the armor’s awkwardness and the lack of visibility of his helmet, the silent signaller appeared to be losing patience.
“Nothing?” the Soviet calmly asked, clipping his ZeG-5 machine gun against his breastplate. That way, he could keep the weapon from flying off in the near-weightlessness.
Bluford breathed loudly, and turned the front of the heavy radio towards his captain. He then pointed to a set of three flickering green LEDs above the frequency indicator and its unreliable red needle, before explaining: “The Noah is transmitting. But we can’t answer back.”
Braun unlocked the bumpy drawer next to him with a nudge, discovering a motherboard, fuses and colorful wires melted by a major overload. Sighting, he opened a small flap on his forearm, revealing several diamond-shaped outlets right to his wrist computer’s glowing screen. “Need extra power?”
“Going through the radioactive dust clouds would drain the batteries in both your armor and life support, boss. Your little Russian lungs need air.”
Smiling, Braun straightened up to resume his surveillance. “Nothing is ever simple…” he breathed, scratching without looking in the blue snow for his pair of binoculars. “Pinochet could have met this guy in any 5-stars hotel dotting the main belt—with sanitized AC and minibars for all of us.”
Behind him, Bluford packed up the radio with an anti-dust cover. “But that damned traitor thinks he’s a James Bond villain. And here we are, tracking his ass down across the Fractured Moons. Freezing our fucking butts for a shitty arms deal.”
“Language.” A beep and a light telltale reflecting off the inside of the captain’s visor alerted him that a new threshold for his oxygen consumption had been reached. “We’re done waiting,” he spoke as he found his binoculars. “Corporal Latrine? Do you read me? Or are you taking a nap again?”
“Suce-moi la veuve et les orphelines, ruskie…,” someone angrily mumbled on the secured short-range channel.
“What’s he saying?” Bluford asked. With the radio back on his shoulders, he had approached the half-open round hatch leading to the lower level.
“Knowing him, it must have something to do with his penis,” grumbled Braun, who was finding it increasingly difficult to stand the multiple-time medal-winning French sniper. “Corporal. We’re going through the Blue distillation hall. Follow the edge of the roof. We’ll meet on the other side as planned before our comms with the ship went south.”
“Roger that,” the French-speaking Marine acknowledged through static.
Raising, Braun witnessed the marksman’s shadow moving above, beyond the twisted steel braces that had once supported the giant dome protecting the colonial factory. The vault had failed to shield the facility from rebel nuclear warheads, but seemed to take great pleasure in disrupting communications.
A minute later, another shower of flakes greeted the captain as he finished climbing down the ladder’s sporadic rungs. In front of him, at the foot of a white dune beside the sergeant, Lance Corporal Kulooq Nielsen probed the darkness of the petrified metal forest. With her minigun’s multi-muzzle resting on one of her broad shoulders, the Inuit colossus born in Boréal was almost two heads taller than the radio-engineer from Las Pallas. Almost immune to the cold, she didn’t wear a Spartan helmet, but a pair of airtight glasses and a yellow oxygen mask embracing red tribal tattoos on her cheeks and forehead—her precious Kakiniit. She hid her armor beneath a thick traditional fur coat.
“Latrine and I have been watching the area for an hour. Neither Pinochet nor his contact will jump on us from behind a pipe fossilized by solar winds…” Braun reassured her before grabbing his binoculars again. With a flick of his thumb, the captain cut it in half. He handed one of the two scopes to the radio operator unsheathing his Beretta, before magnetically clipping the other one on his ZeG-5. “The meeting must take place in the still-tight hangars on the other side,” he resumed, walking towards the disturbing purlieu. “No one expects us here.”
Nielsen nervously rolled her shoulders, making the steel straps holding the ammo crates behind her back creak. “Shame…” she grunted. A haze formed around the CO2 ejectors on her mask below her puffy earmuffs. The mist instantly froze mid-air, turning into glimmering pearls floating around. “I’m longing for action.”
“Stay focused, soldier.”
“Yes, sir.”
The giant girl took a first heavy step before digging her path through the crystallized icy dust. With the tip of her five-barreled weapon, she pushed aside the sclerosed hoses. In the sidereal void, neither her armor plates nor the broken pipes produced a sound.
The walk continued at a steady pace to reach the heart of the complex which remained partially occupied—according to the data collected the day before by their ship in orbit. In the wide underground hangars, Rear Admiral Pinochet of the Martian Techno-Marine and a dozen of his most faithful men have taken up residence, and engaged in arms trafficking. Through the intermediary of a Jovian intraweb fixer named “The Druid”, they used their military cruiser to smuggle weapons and ammo to the guerrillas still active in the Kuiper asteroid belt. Supplying their own enemies’ frontlines.
The troop stopped midway to rest and clean their filters. Braun sat against a huge sieve bolted to the crumbling concrete floor. Bluford was on his way when he nearly tripped over something hidden beneath the dust. Kulooq caught him by a radio cable. The comms produced a shrieking feedback.
“Thanks, mahoosive princess!” he said shortly after, shuffling with his boots on the ground around him. “Landmine?”
“Too big,” the Inuit replied, tapping the dug-up 3-feet wide round plate with her minigun’s back handle. “It’s just another hatch. Underground maintenance corridors for robots. They appeared on the 3D-map.”
“Watch your steps, next time—anything in sight over the canopy, Latrine?” asked Braun as he probed the skies above the sinister rows of piping. Despite the eerie gas giant’s halo, the distillery remained engulfed in darkness.
“Two sentries,” the man replied with a touch of boredom accentuating his strong accent. “Just off your bucolic walk.”
“Thanks for the delayed heads-up, Corporal…” grumbled Bluford as he sat on an empty barrel, cracking his fingers.
With a wave of his arm, the former cop unfolded a mechanical keyboard that started floating down to his abdomen. Humming the chorus of Bob Dylan’s Masters of War, he swiftly tapped the keys as a parabola unfurled over his left shoulder. The dish spun as some strange robotic cantilena completely flooded the radio channel which went silent shortly after.
Half a minute later, the sergeant’s voice echoed in Braun’s and the rest of the team’s ears: “Targets isolated.”
“Take them down, Latrine,” Braun ordered before starting to move again. He glanced disapprovingly at Kulooq, who had already grabbed her knife as large as a Gladius sword.
The dull blade decorated with a strange syllabary returned to its genuine leather sheath as two green dashes crossed the clear sky above their heads. Velospeed bullets with emerald tracer were Latrine’s deadly signature.
“Voilà…” the sniper mocked them, cold as space.
“We don’t have much time,” Bluford resumed. As he trotted off to catch up with Braun and Kulooq, he folded up his keyboard and mini-parabola. “Pinochet’s henchmen aren’t fools. Two beams are already poking these guys’ life support. They’re going to find out really quickly their homies’ vitals are flat as that white girl Meg Ryan.”
“Let them come!” grumbled the Inuit, hastening her pace.
With a flick of his shoulder, Braun shoveled a heavy pipe to make some room, allowing his soldiers to gather momentum and jump across a wide fuming crack. “Latrine?” he asked once on the other side. “Were these sentries guarding anything in particular?”
“The door leading to the board room,” the sniper replied as the team started sprinting between the sparser trees.
“Perfect. Whatever passes through that door, don’t shoot until I say otherwise. Is that clear?”
“Roger that, Capitaine.”
The Techno-Marines and the MP walked through several glades, bleak impact points of shells fired from space during the attack on the refinery. As they moved through a 10-feet tall arch of sapphire ice, Bluford called out to his officer. He had just picked up a message from their ship.
Braun panted. After a day on Uranus IX, his armor has become really heavy to bear. Running different analyses, his life support injected another dose of endorphin along his spine. “What does Pingu say?” he coughed as the hormones rushed to his muddled brain.
“He sent data. Thermal signatures of the old boardroom. They also detected the T. M. S. Río Loa in Ophelia’s orbit. Hidden between two ice clusters.”
“Pinochet’s in the house,” Kulooq completed.
With a thump, she cleared a row of crates, opening a passage through the last few meters of the edge. Once outside the cursed forest, she and Braun came upon the two dead soldiers shot by the sniper, spinning in the meager gravity but still anchored to the floor by their weighted boots. Of their heads, nothing remained but frozen jelly.
“Yummy…” Bluford commented, before dodging a flying insignia of the Third Fleet; the Techno-forces of the Outer Worlds.
“What about the Druid?” Braun asked him. He then pointed to the doorway so his two agents could take up positions behind a gray Separatist fighter hulk embedded in the ground.
Bluford continued after ducking next to Kulooq behind a twisted turbine: “No other ships. Pingu warns me that the Río Loa has just turned her reactor on. I think our friend Pinochet has been stood up by the fixer and is about to dust off! We need to act, boss. Now!”
Braun raged. The Baltimore powering up was bad news. “Latrine?”
No answer.
The Military Police captain looked up to the sky. On the roof, the sniper had vanished into the shadow of a massive black triangle slowly obscuring the gas giant. What was left of an old civilian mineral hauler which took part of the siege during the Civil War grazed the forsaken moon. The entire factory began to shake. Crevices appeared on the surrounding walls, and the starfighter sank deeper into the ground.
“Bluford?” Braun asked, dodging a falling conduit . “You—”
The signaller patted his officer’s shoulder. Voices could be heard over their link. The stranding ship was mixing their signal with the crew of Pinochet.
Everything went black, except for the few discrete LEDs dotting their space battle suit and helmet. The captain’s flashlight automatically turned on on his right temple.
Pointing to the door, Braun explained the attack strategy with precise gestures. Everyone knew the configuration of the room behind, including Latrine in the upper levels thanks to the three-dimensional plans obtained from Exxon-Blue—the corporation that once owned the giant refinery. All knew where to position themselves and quickly disable the Admiral’s bodyguard thanks to prior holo-training and brain-conditioning. Pinochet’s guards were mostly made up of Marines who hadn’t taken part in the war; rookie bandits rather than soldiers. If the Druid had never shown his face, their capture would still be enough to satisfy the Outer Worlds Techno-Marine Command on Callisto.
Braun discreetly placed one of Kulooq’s explosive charges against the giant door at ground level, hoping to clear a large opening. Satisfied, the captain turned off his torchlight, and stepped back to the side, behind two wide pillars made of pure titanium.
Meanwhile, the Inuit stood in front of the gateway a few feet back. New volutes escaped from her yellow mask. Enabling the night vision of her assistant slowly sliding over her round glasses and loading her minigun, she anchored her boots on the frozen floor, thanks to stapling appendices hidden in her soles.
On the comms, the static disappeared for a brief moment when Braun activated the firing mechanism. “Go!” he shouted as the silent explosion shattered in a huge white flash the door and an entire part of the wall.
He and Bluford rolled over the fuming reinforced concrete blocks to take up positions against what remained of old metal desks circling the room. With their guns pressed over heavy monochrome monitors that miraculously survived the blast, both probed the place with their optics. But like Kulooq behind her cover, no one opened fire.
The phantom ship above vanished, leaving the cold halo of the gas giant gradually revealing the room. Dotted with large bullet holes, the large oval table of the Blue refinery’s board lay on the floor, still surrounded by the revolving seats the explosion had set in motion. Here and there, flickering holographic screens had remained active, dispensing an incessant stream of damage reports and silent safety warnings.
No one appeared to be there. The Noah’s Ark had sent them the wrong thermic data. And wrong intel.
“What does that mean?” grumbled Braun as the Inuit joined them, still on the alert.
“Boss?” Bluford interjected. He had dropped the radio under a desk and plugged the auxiliary power supply cable into a still-functioning outlet. “Our two beloved Freaks are on the line!”
Braun leaped to the radio while Bluford activated with his wrist computer the link to the orbiting stealth ship. “Pingu? Mute? What’s happening?” the MP asked.
Mute, the doctor, invited herself onto the channel to apologize, before the Interceptor’s pilot took over. “This is bad, Captain! I’ve been trying to reach you for two hours! We’ve been hacked! We—” An explosion sounded behind Pingu, followed by a violent depressurization hiss. “—two Hummingbird fighters just fired at us!”
“It’s a trap!” Mute shouted.
