When the drill has finished, it retracts back and shifts sideways into its cooling sheath. Sevro waits several minutes for the heat to dissipate before cranking open the top exit hatch of the submersible. On the other side of the hatch, the circular block of hull from the carved hole is suspended by a gravity well built into the submersible’s penetration system. From the cockpit, Min-Min reverses the gravity and the block floats up into the station.
“Hats on,” I say, donning my scarabSkin helmet. My vision goes dark and then the heads-up display flickers to life, brightening the confines of the submersible with its spectral amplifiers. The vitals and names of my friends appear above their heads.
I step toward the hatch to go first, but Sevro puts a hand on my chest. “Trying to get a head start?” I ask.
“Don’t be so competitive, boyo.”
Milia and Clown go in front of me to take point, shouldering their multiRifles. Thraxa follows, her pulseHammer magnetically coupled to a holster on her back. Min-Min swings out of her pilot seat and tosses one of her drones into the air. Small as a thumb and matte black, the projectile races up the hole. She surveys through its cameras and gives us the thumbs-up.
“Playtime.”
The two point Howlers climb the ladder up to the hatch and then go weightless as the gravWell grips them and eases them up through the hole. Sevro removes his hand from my chest.
“Your turn, princess.”
Using the schematics stored in Starhall’s data vault, I chose the water filtration room as our point of entry. It’s dark, full of noise, and entirely automated. Huge machines suck in seawater and desalinate it for the use of the guards and the prisoners. I call up the map on my HUD and a blue waypoint flares to life, marking our target’s cell. White footprints glow on the display, illustrating the path we chose.
I shoulder my rifle and lead them up out of the desalination plant. We move in silence. A station mechanic’s breathing is amplified by my helmet. He glows like a humanoid coal through a hulking photoelectrical oxygen splitter. I move forward, crouched. Then Sevro runs past me and slides to round the corner first. There’s the soft sound of a spider venom round hissing out the narrow barrel of his short-stock rifle. A body crumpling. Sevro hogties the man with plastic restraints and comes back around holding up one finger.
“One.”
Leaving the desalination level behind, we move through the lower bowels of the station like a silent nocturnal animal made of fourteen legs and arms. The station relies on its external defenses, which would eviscerate even a heavy assault force of the Ash Legions, but on the inside, the security systems were made to keep men in, not out.
We subdue several workers sipping coffee from thermoses as they set to their morning work, Sevro and I racing each other to be the first to hit them with our spider rounds. He’s better with firearms than I am, and it’s already four-to-one in his favor as we pass through heavy reinforced security doors so thick they appear to have been made by some ancient race. They’re old and rusted, like the rest of the bones and shell of this dilapidated crab station. Only the sinew is new. Glowing biometric scanners. Sun Industry drones. Crowd-suppressant gas nodules in the ceilings. All neutralized by Winkle’s access into the mainframe.
We activate our ghostCloaks and slip into the open door of a guard station outside the massive doors to the high-security Omega Level. The guards gab to one another over tin breakfast bowls and drink Terran coffee spiced with chicory. To ensure loyalty to the Rising, most of the guards are from my planet. While the political officers are mostly Reds, and wear the Vox Populi inverted pyramid badges sewn into their uniforms to declare their affiliation to the proletariat, the bulk of the guards are still Grays.
Once, I hated Grays. Ugly Dan and the rest of the tinpots that lorded over Lykos left a foul impression. But years on, I respect their discipline, their devotion to duty. And I pity them. For centuries they’ve been the frontline soldiers and battlefield pawns of Golds in house warfare. And now they toil for our Republic.
I remind myself of the endgame: this will end the war. It must.
What will they do then?
Not more than three steps behind the breakfasting guards, I stand in the doorway, a rippling translucent shadow in the ghostCloak. From inside the cloak, the guards are distorted like a child’s crayon rendering. For them it’s another tedious day of gloom in a six-month shift. They’re counting down the hours till they can spend their mandatory thirty minutes in the UV beds to get their vitamin D, and smoke burners in the common room and watch porn experientials on their holoVisors. A thick Gray man with a bulldog neck sniffs the air. He’s in a black uniform, a member of their tactical response squad. He should be a lurcher, but we couldn’t spare specialists down here. They’re needed on the front lines.
He grunts. “Does it smell like wet dog in here?”
“Warden’s pooch don’t leave the roost no more.”
“Someone oughta shoot that poor little shit, out of mercy. It smells like it’s inside out.”
One of the guards looks appraisingly at the contents of his bowl. “Smells like rotten algae to me.”
The man in the black sniffs the air again. “It’s definitely dog.”
“Sorry. That’s just me,” Sevro says. The guard turns in his seat, tracking the sound to the door, where the casual eye might think us a fault in his vision or a premonition of a migraine, but his fixed gaze sees us for what we are. His cracked lips part no wider than a finger’s width when two spider rounds hit him in the neck.
A barrage of puffs and a dozen rounds punch into the flesh of half a dozen men as they try to stand from their chairs. They tremble on the ground as the paralytic agent spreads through their bodies. We deactivate our ghostCloaks and take over the section station, piling the men in a corner. They’ll have a devil’s headache this time tomorrow and might lose their sight for a few days, but they’ll survive. “Six–three,” Sevro says to me. Pebble and Alexandar set up to receive guests if an alarm is raised. The rest of us press into the Omega Level.
The lion’s share of the prison’s general population is housed in levels high above this one. They have communal cells and labor in crews every day from six A.M. to six P.M., hand-sorting the refuse sucked in by the umbilical tubes for recycling or incineration. There’s sanity in an honest day’s work. I would know.