Unstable Prototypes (30 page)

On cue, Silo took full advantage. She made
her way to the chest, pushing the cane into his hands and
shouldering the heavy weapon with an emasculating amount of ease.
One steady shot was fired at each remaining cluster of oxygen
masks, causing a satisfying burst of fire and shrapnel with each
hit. As she fired, Garotte strapped an oxygen mask onto her face,
then onto his own, and finally took a few cane-shots at a trio of
the more courageous guards. Silo took advantage of the cover fire
to flip the heavy weapon to fully automatic, shift her aim to the
primary hangar doors, and unleash. Each bolt of energy took a huge,
molten bite out of the door, revealing the pale light of the weak
midday sun on the icy concrete slab outside. Within a few moments
of perforating the air-tight seal, an alarm with its own reserve
power supply began to sound, and a similarly isolated force field
flickered into place to stop the oxygen loss. Two quick bursts of
fire at the field generator put an end to that. Frigid,
unbreathable air flooded the hangar, causing what few guards
remained to run for the safety of the interior doors, shutting and
sealing them.

"Bloody hell it is cold. I'd forgotten about
the cold," Garotte grumbled, stamping his feet and rubbing his
hands together before investigating the security he would have to
override to gain control of a shuttle.

"Oh gosh!" Silo exclaimed, dropping the gun
into the chest and snatching an oxygen rig from the one remaining
set before dashing off toward the center of the hangar.

"What's the problem?" Garotte asked, quickly
taking up the cane and scanning the area for threats. After a
moment, he realized the problem.

A single guard remained, a fellow unfortunate
enough to take a chunk of an exploded oxygen canister to the calf,
sending him to the ground. In the panic of evacuating the hangar
while under fire, his partners had failed to notice him. From the
looks of it his lungful of good air had given out, leaving him
heaving great gasping breaths that would do him no good at all.

"Hold still, hon," she instructed, holding
him flat to the floor with one arm and slipping the oxygen mask
onto him, "Breathe slow now."

The guard, who from the looks of him was one
of the newer additions to the staff, slowly stopped struggling as
the desperate fear of suffocation was replaced by relief. As his
wits slowly returned, Silo continued to hold him down, tugging at
his pockets and equipment as she did.

"You alright? You breathing fine?" she asked,
checking his eyes and his pulse. "Yeah, you look good. You're
alright, hon. That fragment didn't hit anything important. Next
time get to the door quicker, okay?"

He nodded slowly, his mind finally picking up
where it left off before the madness had begun. At the precise
moment he realized he was face to face with a prisoner in the midst
of an escape attempt, he heard the click and beep of a set of
restraints locking onto his wrists.

"Those boys will be out here to get you in
just a bit. You'll be fine," Silo assured him.

"Good job spotting the downed man," Garotte
said, "Grab the authentication badge, would you?"

Most of the high risk equipment in a given
facility these days was access controlled via biometrics.
Fingerprints and eye scans were incredibly secure, and since it was
fairly difficult to accidentally leave your hands and eyes in your
other pants, the means of access were always available. The method
was not perfect, though, and it was in places such as this that the
primary difficulty became obvious. Guards wore face masks and
gloves, meaning they would have to at least partially remove their
equipment every time they needed to unlock a door. There were ways
around this, but almost all of them involved reintroducing the same
security risks that biometrics were meant to solve. In Millbrook, a
combination of key codes and wireless badges were used. The badges
were simple enough to steal. As for the codes?

"This young lady had the kindness and decency
to save your life, my boy. I'd say that the least you could do is
let her know your access code," Garotte said.

"I... I can't do that," he stammered.

"If you do, I'll stop," Garotte said.

"Stop what?"

"This."

He leaned hard on the injured calf. After an
agonized scream, the guard spat out a seven number sequence.

"Many thanks, my boy. Now, you do realize
that if this is the lock-out code, I'm going to have to come back
and do that again."

The guard flinched. Garotte pivoted his foot
over the injured calf again.

"8-8-3-4-3-6-7!" the guard squeaked.

"That-a boy. When this is all over, grab
yourself a copy of 'Mental Focus and Discipline' by K. Jennings.
Excellent introduction to interrogation resistance techniques. You
could benefit from a few chapters of 'The Science and Application
of Deception' by C. Lightman as well. It'll help you get rid of
that flinch," Garotte advised.

"Don't feel bad, hon. You were just in the
wrong place at the wrong time," Silo said gently, grabbing him by
his collar and dragging him along behind her. "You're Willis,
right? You usually work the east wing. Do me a favor, Willis, when
you take your smoke break, do it
all
the way in the
stairwell. I could smell it in my cell."

"You know, for an improvised plan, that
really went quite well," Garotte said as he causally applied the
code and the badge, opening the door of the nearest shuttle, "Only
one casualty, and really, we'll chalk that up to learning
experience for our boy here. Minimal collateral damage. Getting
into and out of the orbital section might be a bit of a task, but
all things considered I'm quite pleased with..."

A low, distinctive sound drew his attention
to the badly damaged hangar doors. What he heard sounded like a
small hovercar idling, or perhaps a shuttle craft at a great
distance. What he saw was a sleek, somewhat curious looking space
ship hovering just outside the doors. It was nearly as large as the
mobile home-sized Armistice that had brought him here, but was
sporting a full complement of weaponry. An alphanumeric designation
on the nose had mostly been worn away, but just visible were the
letters NX.

"Spoke too soon..." he remarked, before
turning and crying, "Cover, now!"

Garotte dove behind one of the sturdy support
columns, followed by Silo and their unwilling guest. An instant
later, a salvo of powerful energy shots lanced into the hangar. The
mounted guns of the attacking ship swept back and forth, punching
holes in the hulls of shuttles and carving deep divots into the
rear wall.

"Who the heck is that!?" Silo yelled.

"That would be a representative of the group
responsible for taking the inventor! Unless I've missed my guess,
they are responsible for the power outage as well!" Garotte
replied.

"If they're terrorists, then I'm not pulling
any punches," she proclaimed.

Silo took advantage of a brief lull in the
barrage to roll to the still intact weapon chest and withdraw the
heavy rifle and a pair of clips. When no followup attack came, she
reached in and pulled out a second gun, placing it on the floor and
shoving it with her heel toward Garotte. With considerable effort,
he managed to raise it enough to be useful.

"You've got the better cover. On three, let
her loose," Silo recommended.

"Will do," Garotte said, turning to the
restrained guard beside him. "You'd better hope your superiors
didn't cut any corners on their firepower, my boy."

"1, 2, 3!"

With all of the strength he could muster,
Garotte raised the rifle and fired a few shots at the ship. Never
before had he been so relieved that energy weapons had virtually no
recoil. The bolts passed through the space that had previously been
occupied by the hangar doors, but before they reached the ship, a
faint blue shimmer of shield dispersed them.

"No good. We're going to need to find a way
to hit it harder than that!" Garotte managed before the ship
started to return fire.

He ducked further down behind the support
column, itself behind a shuttle. The vehicle and structure combined
managed to keep the ship's weapons from turning him into a cloud of
embers. Another thirty seconds of continuous bombardment reduced
most of the contents of the hangar into mangled twists of molten
and scorched metal before a fizzling pop indicated that something
had gone horribly wrong with the plasma cannons. Had Garotte and
Silo taken any less care in their choice of cover, they would have
been killed halfway through the barrage. As it was, the two
partners and the restrained guard were occupying two of the only
undamaged patches of floor. Garotte and Silo remained perfectly
silent. The downed guard did not. Finally Garotte pulled him face
to face.

"Listen, my boy," he whispered, just barely
louder than the creak and sputter of cooling metal going on around
them, "What you just heard was a plasma emitter failure. If we
don't make a sound, then when they land and send a scout party to
see if we survived, it will take time to find us. That will give us
options. If we continue to make noise, it won't take them long to
figure out where to point their guns. Do you want that?"

The guard's eyes opened wide and he shook his
head.

"Smart boy. … Also, you may want to take a
look at Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: The Path to Recovery by E.
Cummings. It should help you get over this little incident."

For a moment, all was still. The only sounds
were the hiss and collapse of damaged equipment and the unnervingly
quiet sound of the attack ship's engines as it hovered and scanned
the area. The guards who had evacuated the hangar had wisely
retreated much further into the facility, which left the ship as
the only concern, at least for the moment. A vertical red line
projected from a node beneath the nose of the ship and initiated a
deep scan, sweeping slowly across the interior. The ship drifted
steadily back and forth, attempting to get line of sight on as much
of the hangar as possible, but those hidden within kept themselves
carefully out of sight, though this was somewhat complicated for
Garotte, who had to tug and shift the unfortunate Willis along with
him. Finally the ship lowered down, crunching to the icy concrete.
A large door opened and a trio of troops cautiously marched out,
mismatched and highly unique looking weapons held ready and oxygen
masks firmly in place.

Garotte carefully glanced through a hole in
the shuttle that was serving as his cover. With a short sequence of
hand signals, he communicated his findings: Three men, searching,
one pilot, one gunner, three men in reserve. These men clearly had
training, showing every crevice that was even remotely large enough
to conceal a hostile target all due suspicion. Unfortunately, with
the burned out wrecks of eight different shuttles to choose from,
there was plenty of possible cover to check out. As the search
approached Garotte's position, he held perfectly still and readied
the cane.

The instant a foot came into view, he hooked
the ankle and yanked the soldier off his feet, sending him to the
ground faster and harder than his mind had been trained to
anticipate. The other two men burst into motion, but the cane was
quickly reversed and fired, sending a chunk of glass through the
front and back of the first soldier's armor with little regard for
the meat between. A blast from Silo's heavy rifle had even less
trouble dealing with his partner. Those in the ship scrambled to
ready the on-board weapons, but with the shields down, a quick shot
from the rifle opened up a hole in the pilot window and the pilot.
Garotte quickly scooped up a grenade from the belt of the
struggling soldier and tossed it. He too hadn't properly adjusted
to the irregular gravity of the planet, as a toss intended for the
interior of the ship instead bounced and rolled well short.
Fortunately for him and unfortunately for the attackers, the
reserve troops had chosen that moment to mobilize and were
virtually standing on the weapon when it detonated. Two more cane
shots took care of the downed soldier and the navigator, and just
like that, the crisis was over.

Garotte took a deep breath of the oxygen and
tried to rub some life into his numbing hands, surveying the
molten, charred wreck of a hangar around him.

"This is somewhat closer to the outcome I had
been expecting," he said appreciatively, holding his hands over a
still glowing chunk of former transport ship to warm them.

"Every last shuttle is ruined," Silo said.
"How are we supposed to get to the orbital section?"

"Does this place have a secondary hangar?"
Garotte asked Silo.

She slung the heavy rifle over her shoulder
by its strap, bent low, and hoisted the injured guard from the
ground.

"Well? How 'bout it, hon?"

"Th-there's an off-site hangar. It h-h-has
assault craft. Short range. Might get you to orbit," he answered
quickly, his voice shaking as much from fear as from the cold.

"Thanks, sweetheart. How far, and which
way?"

"It's-" Willis began.

"Over that way, just a bit over the horizon,
I'd say," Garotte said, pointing through one of the many holes in
the wall.

In the distance, dust could be seen rising
from the icy, barren ground, as one of the aforementioned assault
crafts blazed toward them. It was small, a one seat vessel, and
rather meager as gunships go, but that didn't mean much. On a
planet with no other vehicles but the now devastated shuttles, it
was by far the fastest and toughest piece of equipment in town.

"I suppose someone got a message out. That
will
complicate matters," Garotte said, scratching his
chin.

Both he and Silo looked to the damaged ship
that had nearly killed them.