“You can go ahead and transfer that into my account,” Casto said with a cocky grin. Then he whipped a quick salute and spun in tight posture to find his squad.
“And then there was one,” Vost muttered.
He hated this part of an op, but since he was the best with the gear—and the mission would suffer from lack of reliable intel—he completed the installation and made sure all tech was shaking hands and playing nice. He whizzed through activating the drone cams and sent them out to map the facility. A few early missteps before they found the tech lab had shown him that the schematics he’d been given were hopelessly outdated. The cons had been inventive in making the station their own; there were traps and hidden defenses all over the place, and if it hadn’t been for the damned expensive armor, he would’ve already been a man down just in setting up the command outpost.
One by one, his screens lit up with preliminary footage from his bots. They showed about what he expected, then he sent out a warning to Bravo team. “There’s mooks on the move, twenty of them. No weapons that can penetrate your armor. Continue as you are, and you’ll be on them in approximately 150 meters.”
“Copy that,” Bravo leader came back. “I can taste those extra credits already.”
He watched as the unit engaged, and the battle was clean, surgical, even. Whoops rang over the comm as the last fell, then the men moved on. He watched as more images came in and wondered why he felt unsettled. Probably because that Conglomerate ass**le made this job sound too good to be true.
Things that seemed that way usually were.
6
Best-Laid Plans
Mungo’s crew wasn’t quite to the west barricades yet. They came in, lurching drunkenly toward the wall, activating the turrets. From his vantage on the other side, Jael watched as the guns mowed them down, but there were enough bodies that they used the death of their mates to push forward. The wall of junk teetered as the brutes scrambled toward the other side, bullets drilling them from the back. Jael was taking a risk by defending close up; his men stood to the rear, waiting for him to kill the enemy or for the cannibals to leave the turret’s range. One mongrel managed to ram his head through the gap, and Jael was waiting with a blade. He shanked the brute in the neck and left his corpse to block the way.
From behind, another of the brute’s cohorts shoved until the body fell and he took his place. The screams of the dying men echoed until Jael’s ears rang with them. The pressure eased as the rounds slammed into the enemy trying to breach their defenses. Jael killed a couple more who made it to the top and yanked them through so he could keep fighting, but the last one died on the floor in a spray of ammunition. The turrets fell silent.
He risked another look, and the hall was clear. Must’ve been more of them on the other side. In the corridor, there were fourteen bodies blown full of holes in various poses, starting from the beginning of the sensor activation all the way to the wall. Then they were piled high enough that he couldn’t see for sure how many there were. Nothing for it but to climb over, haul the corpses, and start rebuilding the barricade.
“How many dead over there?” Dred asked, striding up.
Her checkpoint must’ve held. In here, good news was rare enough that he’d take this as a victory. But he was damned tired of the stench of blood and bodily functions, weary of the endless carnage. Before, it was only a job. Now he wanted out with a ferocity that made the recycled air taste coppery and thin, too tainted for breathing.
Jael lifted a shoulder. “We’ll have to take inventory as we deal with the bodies.”
“The barricades helped, at least.” What she didn’t say was how fast Mungo’s men crawled over them . . . and how determined they were. Nothing deterred them. “I’ve got Grigor’s louts tidying up on the north side. I’ll send them over here when they finish.”
“I’ll get the work started,” Jael said.
They had been hauling corpses for a while when Martine stumbled back toward the checkpoint. Jael saw her coming, dropped the dead mongrel he was carrying, and powered down the turrets. Tam was pale and sweaty, his jaw clenched with the effort of moving on an injured leg.
“A little help?” she shouted.
Jael ran toward them and lifted the other man without asking for permission. “I’ll take you to Dred’s quarters, and we’ll see how bad it is.”
Dred nodded. “Bunk there until you feel better, no arguments. It’s the cleanest place in Queensland.”
“Thanks,” the man said hoarsely.
An hour later, it was clear Tam wouldn’t be going on recon missions anytime soon. We didn’t count on this. There was no telling how long the spymaster would be out of commission. He was resting at the moment, with Martine looking after him, but his injuries meant they couldn’t include him in any plans for a while. Since his skill set was hard to replace, it put them in a hell of a bind.
Dred met him in the hallway. “We’ll bed down in the barracks tonight.”
“Understood.”
He didn’t sleep well, mostly because he wasn’t used to being surrounded by other people. Though the room was sparsely populated, there were too many lungs pushing air in and out, too many hearts thumping away. He felt like shit when he rolled out of the bunk, and he definitely missed the private shower. The public facilities had a dank, yeasty smell.
“I think I’ve come up with a workable solution,” Dred said after breakfast.
She filled him in. After he learned what she had in mind, Jael wondered if Vix and Zediah could really sub in for Tam and Martine. He’d never done field work with them, never seen them do anything at all outside the garden. Yet Queensland needed every advantage it could muster, and timing was critical.
“You sure about this?” he asked.
Dred nodded. “I asked a few key questions. They’re both smart, the most technical-minded I could find on short notice.”
“Then I can’t wait to watch them work.”
“Is everyone ready to go?” Dred asked.
“As we’ll ever be,” Vix murmured.
Despite her scars, she radiated a peculiarly peaceful air. She didn’t seem like a woman who had done something so violent, so repugnant, that she ended up dumped in Perdition to keep her from repeating the offense. Zediah was harder for Jael to read; he maintained a perpetually opaque expression, and his vital signs seldom responded to normal stimuli. Either he was stoic beyond measure, or there was something . . . off about him.