Easy pops up to a knee, ceasing his fire, no longer capable of being the beast beneath the donks’ beds. “Nothing but dead bodies gettin’ in the way!” he shouts. And then he picks off any zhee he can spot in the open between top and bottom bunks.
I see pretty much the same and so I pop up. Our firing has slowed, getting more precise now that the threat in the room is either dead or lying among the dead. Only Lash is keeping up his high cycle of fire, though I suspect it’s no longer needed.
“Okay, cease fire!” I call.
A moment later the SAB whines to a cool. Little fires crackle and pop in the wooden bunk frames. The straw bedding smolders, mixing with the smell of dead and burnt zhee in a way that ups the retch factor already caused by the open toilets instead of covering the putrid odor up.
“Easy. We clear each row and then go. Lana, watch the door. Lash, Winters, cover us.”
I move first, Easy by my side. I visually sweep the top and bottom bunks for any sleepers, putting two blaster bolts into a donk who was probably already dead, lying in the top bunk nearest me. Swinging around the first set of bunks, I turn the corner with my blaster rifle on full auto, filling the pile of zhee I find in the gap between rows of beds with blaster bolts. Easy does the same on the opposite side.
No zhee pop up to stop us, and we repeat on the next row.
“Changing packs,” Easy calls.
“Changing packs,” I repeat, doing the same so I’m fresh before the next round.
Still no donk resistance. I think we got ’em all.
We clear each row of bunks and give the all clear for Lash and Winters to join us by Lana’s side.
“Alpha One, this is Bravo One, how copy?”
I don’t get a response.
“Hopper, this is Carter. We heard a boom on your side of the camp. What’s up?”
The comm jumps to life and immediately I hear blaster fire from the other end. It’s Hopper. “Carter, man! We’re on the run to AT3. Encountered heavy resistance. Had to blow a room just to slow the donks. I’m down two guys. We need support, brother!”
“Copy,” I say, pushing the message to my squad’s comms so we’re all up to speed on what happens now. “We’ve cleared BT2 and are proceeding to BT3. We’ll link up there to help.”
“That won’t work,” Winters says, and his voice is serious.
“Why not?” I ask.
“That won’t work,” Hopper says into my ear as I utter the words. “Your target three is our target four. We had one more stop than you.”
That wasn’t mentioned in the meeting I had with Surber. I look up to Winters. “You know something… spill it because we gotta go now.”
“In the initial planning, Alpha Team was to deny zhee access to a deep-chamber comm room. Keep them from calling into the Soob with a report. We gotta get there.”
“Okay. How?”
There are a ton of questions in my mind right now, but I’m chalking it up to Winters having sat with Surber and the Pekk chieftain all night and hearing more of the big picture than I was told. Hopper seemed to know more than me as well. So it’s not really a surprise. One thing about the way Big Nee and the execs run this operation is that everything—everything—is need to know.
“Fastest way is back to the front of the compound and around, but that won’t work.”
“Why not?”
Winters hesitates.
“Hey,” Lash says, pushing the kid hard on the shoulder. “If you know something, you best say it now, ’cause Alpha sounds hip deep in trouble.”
The kid looks around and says, “The Pekk tribe should be starting a full-force assault on those front gates. We don’t want to be caught in that. Fastest route now is to clear Bravo Target Three and then move on to take AT3 and relieve Alpha team.”
I let out a sigh. Not only because it means that we’ll have to take the temple down ourselves instead of with the support of Hopper’s team, but because this whole situation was likely avoidable if we’d have just been able to do the planning ourselves. I don’t care what assurances Surber gave, this is exactly why I was uneasy with an out-of-the-box op.
The directions are never as clear as the brass think. Never.
“Anything else we need to know?” I ask Winters.
The kid shakes his head.
“Okay, let’s move up on the objective. We’ll blow the room after we clear it to keep anyone from following us from the compound.”
“No,” Winters says, and I can feel the annoyance in the group.
“Why not?” I ask through gritted teeth.
“We might need to fall back through the exit. Harder to do if it’s on fire.”
I’m pretty sure there’s more than one way out of the temple itself, but it’s a fair enough point and I’m not going to waste time arguing. “Fine.”
I pull out a little holo-stick and approach the door leading to the temple. Stacked up against the wall itself, I push the stick underneath the solid wood door and watch the holoimage on my watch.
“Hallway is clear, but it’s a thirty-meter walk to the next set of doors leading to the temple.”
I stand up and try the door. It’s locked.
“Lash?”
The big man rolls out from his cover against the wall and with a booming kick, forces the door in. It swings wildly and then we’re all moving down the corridor. It’s fairly nondescript. Stone walls with iron-grated open air windows placed about two feet over our heads. High enough so you can’t see out but the moonlight can come in
