October 31, 2388 AD
Sol System
Oort Cloud
Saturday, 7:35 AM, Earth Eastern Standard Time
'Let's go, Robots!' Major Roberts pounded through the hangar bay, laying down cover fire across the catapult deck. Several enemy Stingers rushed them in bot mode but apparently were reluctant to go to guns inside their own facility. PFC Kent ran up a wall and flipped over a troop lifter to the left of the major, firing into the back of the vehicle's engine cowl. The cowl blew free as he passed overhead. The PFC hit the ground rolling to cover on the far wall. PFC Gray was right behind him, firing into the open-engine port with a grenade launcher. The grenade detonated inside the skin of the lifter, blowing out the walls of it in all four directions.
'Watch your right flank, Major!' Gunnery Sergeant McCandless warned him, and she dove across the cat lane in front of a Lorda that was catting out.
She rolled aross the runway behind a pylon, and a stack of pallets raised up to fire her HVAR at the Stinger that was racing toward the major. Her HVAR rounds
'Good shooting, Gunny.'
'Yes, sir.' Tamara checked her ammo, and Major Roberts took the hint and did the same. 'If you don't mind my asking, Major, what the fuck is it that we are doing in here again?'
'Gunny, we are here to make a general goddamned nuisance of ourselves and to gather intel.' Roberts stood and let go with a quick burst of cover fire back toward the catapult control booth, where several drop-tank support troops had filed up to hold the marines at bay. There weren't that many of them, and the major was beginning to suspect that the Seppies hadn't planned for a ground assault by AEMs. And that was a bad mistake on their part.
'Johnny? Where the hell are you, Lieutenant?' Roberts asked over the tac-net.
'We are a story up and east of you, about a hundred meters on the far wall of the bay, sir.' Roberts could see the blue dot in his DTM but had no visual.
'You got anything interesting over there?'
'Yes sir, I do. Suez has stumbled across what looks like blueprints to a mass driver, sir!'
'Yeah, there's one on the moon of this place, I've been told.' Roberts checked his blue force tracker and mapped out where all of his robots were. Suez was deep inside, several stories in beyond the hangar. How the sneaky bastard had managed that, Roberts wasn't quite sure.
'Uh, no sir. This mass driver is here, sir. Only a few hundred meters in.'
'What? Is it operational?' Roberts expanded his mindview and downloaded the blueprints and the map data that Lance Corporal Suez had uncovered.
'From what we can tell, it looks like it is, Major. Any orders, sir?'
'You're goddamned right. Robots! Converge on Suez and let's see if we can't commandeer us a big fucking gun!'
Tamara rolled out from behind the pallets and launched several grenades into the booth, sending it crashing down onto the support troops beneath it. The cat field generators must have been connected somehow because one of the boxes at the end of the runway blew out like a volcano. Secondary explosions followed along a conduit around the hangar wall. Several SIF generators blew as well. The deck shook so hard from the explosion that Tamara and Roberts were both tossed backward off their feet. Had there been an atmosphere in the hangar, the shock wave from the explosion would have probably killed them both. But they were in the vacuum of space, and the explosion did its job with no blast wave. It was a lucky-as-hell shot, but luck counted, as far as the marines were concerned.
'Scratch one hangar.' The gunnery sergeant grinned a toothy smile that Roberts could see through her faceplate.
'Scratch it? Hell, I think you broke the piss out of it, Gunny.'
'Look, Danny, this tunnel to our left is really a construction elevator shaft to the control room of the mass driver. It goes down probably a kilometer.' Suez scanned the adit to the underground facility for any sign of enemy-troop movement but found no trace of it. The computer system at the entrance room had been left unmanned and operational. It didn't take long for his recon AIC to hack the login and to start pulling data. He looked back down the shaft of the elevator. There was only a safety bar at waist height across the opening and no lift in place. The readout to the right of the shaft was lit at the bottom, which suggested that the eleveator was all the way down. He pushed the top button and it lit up.
'Why don't they use the thing if it's operational?' PFC Bates asked.
'Maybe it was their day off? How the hell do I know?' Suez smirked. 'You want to wait for the major or check it out?'
'I vote we wait.'
'Suez, let us the fuck in!' There was a pounding at the air lock door.
'Did you hear that?' PFC Bates slipped his visor hissing back down into place and nervously turned with his HVAR to the ready.
'Take it easy, Danny.' Suez checked the blue dots in his DTM and then cycled the lock on the exterior door. The overpressure air blew out into the hall chamber and then equalized. The lock opened, and the lieutenant, Sergeant Nicks, and Corporal Pagoolas clanked in. From trained reflex actions, each of them popped their visors to get a breath of real air. AEMs never knew when they'd get a chance to breathe real air, so they immediately did so every chance they got.
'Lieutenant.' Suez nodded his armored head.
'That's the tunnel?' The lieutenant looked down the shaft and whistled.
'Yes, sir.'
