“Wait,” Knight snapped. “Drones have picked up motion headed our way…and I’m guessing it’s the Commander’s tram.”
“Against the wall; stand by weapons,” the Marine Sergeant snapped. Her people leapt to obey, with the non-Marines only a few seconds behind.
There was no visible trail on the concrete floor to show where the tram usually ran, but with the attack team pressed to the walls, they were probably safe.
Roslyn swallowed hard. She had a carbine slung across her back, but she had no intention of using the weapon. Power ran through her limbs as she summoned her magic. Whatever happened next was going to be…interesting.
The tram came hurtling up the slope with its lights disabled, only barely visible in the infrared lights as the SUV-sized vehicle whirred up to them on electric motors—only to violently careen over onto its side half a dozen meters ahead of them.
It wasn’t quite large enough to fill the tunnel from side to side, but it was large enough that the nearest fire team was in active danger.
Except they were in exosuits. Corporal Andrews bodily stepped into the oncoming vehicle, leaning their shoulder into the vehicle and smashing it to a halt with a resounding crash.
Two figures leapt from the vehicle as it ground to a halt, moving with blurring speed as they swung penetrator rifles toward Andrews. Unfortunately for them, there was a reason the Corporal had stepped forward alone, and their fire team opened up on the attackers.
Augments weren’t faster than bullets. Tungsten penetrator rounds hammered into the roof, but none struck the Corporal before their attackers were down.
“Danger close,” Andrews reported sharply. “Explosives in the tram!”
The Marines recoiled as one, and Roslyn threw up a defensive barrier between them and the vehicle—barely in time. Multiple explosives had apparently been linked to the Augment’s life signs and detonated simultaneously, spraying intentional fragments and tram debris alike toward Roslyn’s attack team.
None of the deadly spray made it through the shield of solidified air and pure force Roslyn put in its path, the antipersonnel mines failing in their lethal purpose as she protected her people.
But there was a second purpose to the explosions, and that was made clear moments later as gunfire hammered into the barrier. Two Augments had ridden the tram forward to try and take Roslyn’s team by surprise.
The rest had dismounted farther back and brought portable cover with them. Distinctive snap-hiss-crack sounds marked the deployment of foxhole grenades, laying out chest-high barriers of bulletproof foam as the lab’s defenders moved up in full force.
Her people had the same grenades—but they also had Roslyn Chambers.
“Grenades,” Mooren snapped. “Hold on the Mage’s order—Commander?”
“Launch,” Roslyn agreed, opening a gap at the top of her barrier as the Marines hurled their weapons forward. The grenades weren’t the armor-piercing weapons they might use against exosuits—but those weapons required greater accuracy than this mess was going to allow anyway.
Their own waves of deadly shrapnel scythed down the corridor, buying time for Roslyn’s Marines to move up and take what cover they could against the wreckage of the tram. Several more foxhole grenades went off amidst the debris, turning the vehicle’s hulk into useful cover even for the exosuits.
“Locking in targets,” Knight reported. “I make it fourteen. All appear to be Augments, carrying penetrator rifles with medium body armor.”
There were very few unaugmented humans who could carry the big automatic penetrator rifles with their discarding-sabot rounds. Roslyn had encountered the stripped-down version used by the Protectorate Secret Service, but those guns cost more than the exosuits they were supposed to take down.
The Republic had gone for Augment cyborg soldiers instead, with upgraded bones and muscles that could carry and fire the heavy weapons. Now over a dozen of those super-soldiers were dug in ahead of Roslyn’s people.
“Your call, Sergeant,” Roslyn murmured. “I can hold the shield for a while yet.”
She’d pay for it later, but Roslyn was a naturally powerful Mage, of some of the strongest bloodlines out of Project Olympus. A hail of tungsten darts wasn’t going to cause her problems.
“We can’t shoot back through the field, and grenades didn’t do shit,” Mooren replied. “Marines, on my mark. Commander, drop the shield on…mark.”
They couldn’t have done it more smoothly if they’d practiced a thousand times. The Marines probably had practiced the drill, but with Marine Combat Mages.
She dropped the defensive barrier at Mooren’s command, and the Marines opened fire in the same instant. Killough and Bolivar joined the fire a moment later with their own lighter weapons.
Half of the Marines carried the same heavy penetrator rifles as their opponents. The high-speed tungsten darts from those went right through the foam of the foxhole grenades, sending Augment soldiers sprawling backward.
Two more had grenade launchers, dropping a mix of armor-piercing and shrapnel grenades behind the defenders’ cover. The last four Marines had big auto-shotguns designed for specialty munitions. They were firing heavy shot, each “pellet” the size of a smaller shotgun’s slug and punching through armored soldiers like they were made of paper.
The exchange of fire lasted a few seconds after Roslyn dropped the barrier, then everything fell silent.
“Move up,” Mooren barked. “Secure prisoners and watch for a second wave. That’s only half an Augment Corps platoon!”
Unspoken was the warning that the other sixteen cyborgs were almost certainly somewhere in the base. They’d met the first line of defense and overcome it without losses…but that didn’t mean they were done yet.
Far from it.
31
Their trip down the rest of the tunnel was uninterrupted until the very end. That was when Knight’s drones, scouting ahead of them, ran into the same kind of targeted anti-drone pulse screen as had been set up in Killough’s apartment.
“Drones are fried,” the Corporal reported. “I have a second set, but they’re going to run into the same thing. Visual I got says they weren’t playing games at this end of the passageway.”
The tunnel had taken them six hundred meters to the west and almost
