Frost Station Alpha 1-6: The Complete Series (3 page)

Makkon leaped away, almost catching some of the backlash. Before his feet touched the ground, he had identified the blue edge of the unfamiliar barrier, recognizing the shield for what it was. He had never seen such technology, but he could not allow anything here to surprise him. Naturally, progress would have been made in the last hundred and fifty years.

The soldier charged out with a woman right behind him. They both wore black military uniforms and carried weapons.

“Go,” the leader barked, turning himself in the corridor so that he blocked the woman from Makkon’s view. He thrust his rifle through the shield, causing a slight ripple in the translucent barrier, and fired.

Makkon wasn’t faster than a laser, but he
was
fast enough to see the soldier’s finger tensing on the trigger and to leap out of the way just ahead of the shot. A crimson beam streaked down the corridor, missing his side by an inch. Almost before he’d landed, Makkon was lunging forward. He had the gist of the barrier—it would let the soldiers shoot out while blocking incoming fire—and thought he could disarm the man. Though the soldier tried to fire again, Makkon was too quick. He grabbed the muzzle of the rifle and yanked it away.

It came through the barrier, and the soldier, unbalanced by the powerful pull, stumbled forward too. The shield moved with him, and Makkon had to skitter back to avoid coming into its range. He did not know if he would simply bounce off, or if it could injure him.

With the soldier deprived of his weapon, Makkon backed up a few steps to fire. He had no idea how much damage that barrier could withstand, but he aimed to find out. He thought about trying to clobber it with his ice axe, but he didn’t know the ramifications of being connected to something that touched the shield.

As Makkon fired, the soldier pulled out a laser pistol to replace his missing weapon. Instead of shooting, he backed down the long corridor, going in the same direction that the woman had run. That told Makkon much. The barrier did not go all the way around the man.

Makkon fired again, raining laser fire at it, but he also eyed the walls, calculating angles. Lasers didn’t have the same properties as bullets, but they would bounce off an object that was too dense to melt right away. He charged toward the soldier, knowing he would have to get close to find the right angle.

The man’s eyebrows rose in surprise, but he appeared confident in his shield. He paused and leaned forward to thrust his pistol through it. Makkon dove into a roll, the axe on his back clunking on the deck, an instant before he fired. He heard the screech of the laser beam, even if he could not see it blasting through the air above him. Then he leaped to his feet, no more than two feet from the soldier’s forcefield. He whipped up his rifle, as if to fire straight at it, but then jerked it to the side. He squeezed off two blasts. They struck the wall in succession at infinitesimally different spots and ricocheted. His calculations were correct. The first beam only glanced past the back of the soldier’s thigh, but the second tore into his shoulder, half burning the man’s arm from his body.

His scream of pain tore through the corridor, piercing Makkon’s eardrums like daggers. Makkon grimaced. He’d seen plenty of death in his life, and been responsible for some of it, but he had never claimed to like it. He was fully aware that these soldiers were the
descendants
of those who had obliterated his home world, not the bastards themselves.

The soldier crumpled to the floor, not dead yet. Good—Makkon expected the communications station would require a passcode or scan.

Before trying to figure out how to extricate the gasping man from the shield, which had fallen atop him, Makkon glanced toward the end of the corridor. He expected the female soldier to be long gone. Instead, she was leaning around the corner of an intersection forty meters away, a rifle pointed in his direction. She fired without hesitation. Makkon dropped to the ground, the injured man and his shield the only cover in the corridor. Her laser almost sizzled through his hair, and he chastised himself for not paying more attention to his senses. If he hadn’t glanced up, he would have been dead, and he would have deserved his fate.

“Recriminate later,” he muttered to himself, leaning around the forcefield to return fire.

Not surprisingly, the female soldier had already ducked back around the corner. Makkon tried to listen over the wailing alarm—oh, how he wished he could find the speakers to blow them up. He had excellent hearing, as everyone on his team did, but he did not detect the sound of footsteps running away. Had it been quieter in the corridor, he might have heard her breathing. Even though he did not, he believed she was still there.

Something flew around the corner. A grenade. Before it had traveled even a few feet, Makkon shot it. It exploded more than thirty meters away. He felt the heat and winced away from the brilliant flash of light, but the shrapnel it flung did not harm him. What few pieces flew all the way down the corridor were blocked by the soldier’s forcefield.

Makkon thought he caught a faint gasp of pain as the roar faded. From the woman? He might have blown up the grenade early enough that some of the shrapnel caught her.

This time, he did hear footsteps. He jumped up, planning to race after her, forcefields or not, but a clang came from the corridor behind him, back in the direction from which he had come. A hatch banging open? He had no way to know if it was friend or foe. After a brief hesitation, he growled and returned his attention to the man at his feet. He couldn’t let the soldiers reclaim this station.

Keeping his back to the wall so nobody could sneak up on him, Makkon considered the fallen man and the faint ring of blue that he believed marked the edge of the forcefield. He found a gap and levered the tip of his rifle under it. It rose a few inches, but he couldn’t fling it aside without the soldier moving. The man groaned when he tried. It was as if the barrier was attached to him by a leash, though nothing was visible. Makkon spotted a compact device on the front of his belt, a single button on it. Lifting the shield with one rifle, he stretched toward it using the rifle he had pulled from the soldier. With a single tap, the forcefield disappeared.

“Handy device,” Makkon murmured, “though it would have been better for you if it had extended all the way around.”

The soldier glared at him and said nothing.

Makkon set the rifles aside and hefted him to his feet. “Can you operate the comm?”

The man, a bronze-skinned veteran with gray threading his black hair, sneered at him. He was full of defiance despite the pain tightening his eyes, and he did not beg for mercy, not like a couple of the men in engineering had.

Makkon nodded, respecting that in the man, but he needed an answer. Salek would have interrogation drugs in his kit, but he was on the other side of the station. Pain and intimidation were the only tools Makkon had available to him.

He grabbed the soldier by the throat, holding him tight enough to get a good grip but not tight enough to crush his windpipe. Fear and pain flushed the man’s face as Makkon lifted him from the deck. The soldier was almost as tall as he was, but that did not matter. Makkon adjusted his stance, giving him the leverage to raise his foe high enough that his toes dangled inches above the deck.

“Can you operate the comm?” Makkon asked again, speaking slowly, enunciating each word clearly so the man could not possibly misunderstand.

“Who
are
you?” the soldier gritted out, the hand around his neck half-strangling the words. He wasn’t looking Makkon in the eyes. His gaze was fixed on Makkon’s bare forearm, or perhaps on the gash there. Makkon had received it during the fighting in engineering, and a few drops of blood still trickled from it. “Not an android.”

“Nor a cyborg,” Makkon said. “Another guess?”

Makkon could have laughed at the notion that these people truly had no idea where he and his team had come from when they were orbiting and studying his moon, but there was no time. That woman had gotten away, and other soldiers could still be loose on the station too. His team had come into this with poor intelligence, but he knew there were dozens of scientists here in addition to the soldiers, any one of whom might come up with a clever plan to thwart his people if they were given time. This takeover had to be swift and absolute.

“No,” the soldier wheezed.

“Last chance. The comm.” Makkon raised his eyebrows.

His captive closed his eyes. Makkon tightened his grip around his throat. His shoulder was getting tired from holding the soldier aloft, but he would never show it. The man’s face started to turn purple. Would he truly die without answering the question? He looked like a combat specialist, not a comm officer, but Makkon dared not kill someone who might be the only one left alive who could send a message. If his team wasn’t able to open negotiations with the government, then all of this was for naught.

“No,” the soldier finally rasped, the word barely audible above the alarm still blaring in the corridor.

Makkon dropped him.

The woman. She had to be the one he needed.

Some faint sound reached his ears, or his instincts simply warned him, and he spun when he grew aware of someone approaching from behind.

“Just me, Makk,” Brax, his co-commander on this expedition, said. Blood spattered the burly graying man’s arms and darkened one side of his head, but he did not appear seriously injured. He still had all of his weapons. “This the place?” He jerked his chin toward the door near Makkon as he approached.

“Yes.”

“Not the comm officer?” Brax’s gaze shifted toward the soldier, who lay curled at Makkon’s feet, trying to hold his arm to the side of his body and still gasping for air.

“No.” Makkon gritted his teeth, hating to admit that he had likely let the comm officer go. “There was a woman who got away. We’ll see if we need someone to get in. If we do, I’ll hunt her down.”

Brax shot the downed soldier, startling Makkon. The blast took the man between the eyes, killing him instantly. The soldier might have died anyway, but Makkon bristled at the cold-blooded killing. There were actions that were acceptable in the heat of combat that were not tolerable in the aftermath. But Brax had battlefield command experience, and he would not appreciate a lecture from a mere hunt leader, even if the president had deemed them equals for this mission. Still, he could not keep his mouth shut.

“The more we kill, the harder time we’ll have getting them to agree to a deal.”

“As if you didn’t kill seven men yourself down in engineering. They’re soldiers. Soldiers are expendable. They always have been.” Brax’s mouth twisted with bitterness, the ice tiger tattoo on his face seeming to writhe with irritation that matched its owner’s. Yes, Brax knew all too well that soldiers were expendable. How ironic that he was among those who had survived.

Brax strode for the doorway to the communications room. Makkon caught his arm before he could pass.

“What are you about,
Hunt Leader
?” Brax scowled down at the grip. He’d said the words the same way he might have said
private
to a soldier in his command.

“It’s been ten minutes, twelve now, since we first attacked. If those soldiers were up here the whole time, they may have had time to set a trap. They were leaving when I walked in, almost crashed into me.” Brax waved at the bracer on his left arm; it was where Dornic, their engineer, had installed a sensor-scrambling device, one they hadn’t been certain would work against today’s technology. It had been a relief to find out that it did and that they’d managed to infiltrate the station completely undetected.

Brax glared through the open doorway, but said, “You’re right. Good thinking.”

He eased inside, but only went a step before crouching down and peering in all directions.

Makkon was tempted to go peek around, too, but he pressed his back to the wall by the door so he could watch both directions down the corridor. He tapped his right bracer, the one with the comm unit embedded. “Dornic, Zar, report.”

“Trying to fix the mess you made in engineering, sir,” came Dornic’s voice, glum and sour, as usual. “Apparently, it didn’t occur to anyone shooting that the equipment had to survive long enough for us to live here for a few days.”

“Do your best,” Makkon said. “We’ve got the ship if we need it.”

“That’s almost as much of a mess.”

“Zar here, sir,” spoke a second voice, a young excited one. “We believe we’ve found the scientists, but they’ve locked themselves in vaults. There are at least three of them that we’ve located. Want us to try blowing the doors open?”

“Absolutely.”

“Makkon,” Brax said from inside the room. “Got it.”

Makkon stepped inside and found his comrade holding a string of grenades in his hand. “Disarmed?”

“I certainly hope so.”

Makkon snorted and scanned the rest of the room, watching, listening, and smelling for further signs of traps. He caught the lingering scent of some floral perfume or perhaps shampoo. The woman’s? This was probably her station. He growled at himself, wishing he had gone after her right away. She could be anywhere now.

“Problem?” Brax asked.

“Yeah, that woman I let get away. Bet she’s the one who can operate the computer in here.”

“I’m sure
I
can operate a computer.” Brax sniffed and strode over to the one console that had lights and displays. The others were dark and silent. “Things don’t look that different.”

“I was more thinking that there would be a passcode or even another trap rather than that you couldn’t handle pushing some buttons.”

“Hm.” Brax waved his hand over a sensor and jabbed a couple of buttons. A holo display formed in the air, the front of an eyeball coalescing.

“Retina scan required for access,” the computer said.

Makkon pushed a few more buttons.

“Access denied.”

“Who’s allowed to access the computer?” Brax asked.

“Access denied,” was all it said.

Makkon sighed and tapped his bracer. “Dornic, come up to communications as soon as you can.”