Defiance: (The Spiral Wars Book 4) by Joel Shepherd

Author:Joel Shepherd
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2017-10-01T06:00:00+00:00

Trace’s marines passed through the core bridge level without bothering to check rooms and offshoots — the secure doors were wide open, and here there were signs of a violent assault, bullet holes in the walls and the starburst spray of grenade explosions. All the bodies were parren, and Trace could not see any sign that attacking sard had received defensive fire. Likely they’d fired only to provoke more panic, and stop anyone on the station from even thinking about fighting back. Then the nanoparticles had been released, either from them or from docked shuttles, or penetration weapons or some other initiator Phoenix hadn’t guessed at yet.

She couldn’t guess why. Possibly they didn’t want anyone on the station to be telling tales, and so killed fifty thousand parren so they wouldn’t tell anyone who’d attacked them. That didn’t seem especially smart, as by now everyone was starting to guess, and V-striking the station afterward to destroy all evidence would only raise more questions at the highest levels of parren government. Maybe there was something specific to this operation that required the station be killed. Or maybe it was simply that deepynines, whatever their new alliance with alo and sard, had never lost their old habit of killing every inconvenient organic in sight, on principle.

“Major,” said Sergeant Kunoz from up front, and Trace saw he’d paused atop a passage at his feet, into which Private Ali was probing. A vast camera pan around showed secure doors and micro-G offices — the rear administrative section of the shipping bridge, which this parren design located up near the ships themselves, instead of on the gravity rim, as was more typical of human stations. “Schematic says this is it. There’s major explosive damage, looks like the sard came this way and tried to blast it. I guessed we interrupted them when they were halfway in.”

“If they had deepynine drones along,” Private Ali offered, “you’d think they’d just cut through with their laser thingys.”

“Styx,” Trace called. “You get any reading on this thing?”

“Major, it is definitely the secure room, it is completely autistic and has no network connections. I cannot penetrate past that door, and the secure wall goes all the way around, there is no weak entrypoint.”

“Any ideas how we get inside?”

“Uh… Major?” said Private Ali, reaching to try the inset manual handle. “Damn thing’s unlocked.” He pulled, and the door slid with nothing more than the weight of his suit. “Looks like the sard did get in.”

“Well shit,” said Kunoz. “There goes our mission. If they got those logs, they’ll have copied and erased the originals. We got nothing.”

Trace gave a harder jet of manoeuvring thrusters, accelerating up a hallway with the occasional bounce of a boot. “Sergeant Kunoz, take one section and secure the interior, watch for traps and be damn careful. Lieutenant Zhi, secure and hold a perimeter about that room. I’m coming up.”

She bounded into the office section, past marines holding cross-corridors with ready rifles, then into heavy steel halls

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.