Fear the Survivors (32 page)

And none too soon. For Hektor had used his improbable angle of attack to wrench his feet downward, even as Niels twisted in midair, and he had also activated his forearm-mounted laser. Targeting Niels’ weapons arrays, Hektor fired. The laser itself did not actually ignite, they had no desire to start actually destroying systems on each others’ suits, but the systems governing the test environment assessed the accuracy and intended power of the shot, and predicted the damage it would cause.

Niels’ suit told him his sonic punch had just been hit, even as he sent the fire command to his own laser, bringing his arm around to fire at the matte black of his CO’s helmet. But even as the test system logged Niels’ laser firing, Hektor’s feet were coming into play.

The blow was hard. Even with controls on his systems Hektor’s entire weight was behind it, and it would have snapped Niels in two if he were unprotected. But Niels’ black suit tensed under the pressure, the hit conducting instantly across Niels’ body, just as Hektor registered the other four fighters engaging their test systems and entering the fray. His reactions were lightning fast. He knew exactly which side the other four would choose.

They were clearly going to take this opportunity to kick their CO’s ass. Hektor smiled inside his helmet. Well, they were going to try.

Releasing Niels’ arm, he registered the other man being driven into the hangar’s concrete floor, and felt the momentum of his own two-booted kick being transferred back to him, driving him backward and away.

The first sonic punches and laser strikes hit him midair, but he had anticipated the other four men’s angle of attack and twisted his helmet away from them. Their attacks were wasted on the black armor of his suited back as he spun. He had about half a second before they could fire again, and he reacted fast, knowing he only had a moment before they were on him.

Selecting targets and programming them into his attack arc, he swung his arm across them, automatically firing as it went, the training system assessing and assigning likely damage as it went. Hektor thought he should be able to score a few good blows before they were on him and the real fighting began.

But they had specifically practiced attacking a single target en masse, in case, heaven forbid, they ever came up against one of the two surviving enemy Agents. They had even sparred as a team with Quavoce a couple of times. They had been massacred by the Agent with disturbing alacrity, but they had registered steadily higher simulated hits on Quavoce’s own systems as they progressed, and it had been clear that they would be able to make either Pei or Mikhail pay very dearly indeed if they ever met one of them in the field.

Those practice sessions had taught them not to waste their shots, and to use their greater numbers to their full advantage. So Bohdan Lewycka, one of the four men closing on Hektor, had withheld his weapons from the initial attack in case Hektor pulled just the move he had.

As Hektor landed he was instantly accelerating at a tangent to the four men that were spreading out to close in on him. This served to counter the effects of their spreading formation, forcing contact with one or two of them at a time, instead of allowing them to come at him all at once.

For his part, Niels was also recovering from the beating he had received and climbing to his feet again as he reeled from the body blow that had felled him. But he would be precious seconds joining his compadres, seconds that would have seen him dead against an Agent, and Hektor did not factor him into his immediate plans.

Nor did he factor in being hit hard with Bohdan’s delayed laser strike either. The test system assessed the strike a direct hit on his forearm mounted barium laser and disabled it, along with one of the four radar and visual mounts ranged around his helmet. It came at an inopportune moment for Hektor as he was still figuring out what had happened when he came into contact with Tomas Koleshnikov, the most junior of the team.

Tomas was not lacking bravery and he was not reticent as he braced for hand-to-hand combat with the fearsome Hektor. In the quarter second before they collided he kicked his right foot forward with all his might at Hektor’s stomach. But as Tomas committed to the attack, Hektor flexed left, grasping Tomas’s leg as he went by, and throwing all his weight into a wrenching twist away from Tomas. Done at this speed without armor, the move would have shattered every bone in Tomas’s leg and possibly ripped it off completely, but it would also have crushed Hektor’s own rib cage and dislocated one or both of his shoulders in the process.

It did none of those things though. What it did do was refocus Tomas’s entire weight into a screaming arc around Hektor, while leaving the other man facing outward, away from Hektor, and unable to fight back. Cara Weisz, the only female member of the team, saw it just in time. Just before she pounced in to help the hopelessly outmatched Tomas, she saw that Tomas was rapidly turning into a weapon himself. As Hektor wielded the other man like a club toward Cara, she dropped, driving under the arc of Tomas’s black-clad body.

Ayala and Quavoce approached from the side to the sound of thuds and thumps and a mild sense of alarm filled Ayala as she registered the vicious fight going on. She started forward, a shout about to escape her lips, but Quavoce stopped her gently with a hand on her shoulder sensing the training mode of the squad’s systems with his own onboard sensors.

Smiling, he reassured her, “They’re just practicing.”

She looked back at Quavoce, then at the six troopers going at it, and the sheer violence of it began to sink in. Hektor had managed to get at least a glancing blow into Cara with the massive bat that was Tomas’s body, before letting the poor boy go, and sending him flying off into the air toward the three other men as they also closed on Hektor.

Two of them dodged Tomas handily, but Niels deliberately got in the boy’s way to bring Tomas back to ground, and they both were soon heading back into the fight. Meanwhile Cara had managed to connect with Hektor’s legs, not in a powerful blow, but it was enough to bring Hektor down on top of her. Hektor pranced, trying to avoid Cara’s grasp, trying to stay unencumbered, but Cara was good, one of the best after Hektor himself, and she managed to keep Hektor embroiled in a hand-to-hand grapple on the ground as the others got to grips with their CO as well.

Hektor knew he was done for when he did not manage to avoid Cara’s wily grasp. But he was still going to make them work for it, and as they began landing their blows, he punished any foolhardy attack with ferocious counter kicks and punches, laughing giddily as he did so. He saw them in 3-D, from inside and outside instantaneously. He had no point of view. He was looking at them from above and below, from the edge of his boot and the tip of his fist, all at once.

They needed to know that numbers were not enough and that the suits did not make them invulnerable. He taught them that lesson in spades and he sensed their improvement, even over the few short but grueling weeks they’d had to spar together.

As the training system assessed their hits and his systems began shutting down, he kept fighting, wounded but still deadly. Only nineteen seconds had passed from the moment he first struck Niels. In that time, he had landed over fifty blows, each of them powerful enough to kill an unarmored man. That he was losing was moot. He was thrilled by the mechanical efficiency with which his team was beating him down, and it was from within this maelstrom of his last desperate counterattacks that he sensed the approach of Ayala and Quavoce from across the hangar floor.

“Attention!” he screamed across his link to them. It took them a moment to respond but a second later they had stopped fighting, and were stumbling to untangle themselves and climb to their feet, forming into some semblance of a line. Their movements were somewhat awkward as they waited for Hektor to disengage the training mode from their suits and give them back control over their ‘damaged’ systems.

Releasing the training wheels, he felt his body come back online. Sensor suites came back to 100% like blackened eyes opening once more and he sent the open command to his helmet fascia.

“Lieutenant Gruler,” said Quavoce as they approached, “most impressive. I will be factoring your latest tactics into our next matchup. I may even use some of them myself.”

Hektor was breathing hard as the shielding in front of his face slid smoothly to the side, revealing his sweating, grinning face beneath. Adrenalin pumped in batch lots around his body as the battle high made his dilated pupils seem ready to pop. But he managed a small nod to match his smile at Quavoce’s comment, respect for his tactical superior showing in his face.

“Yes,” said Ayala, still somewhat shell-shocked at the sight of Hektor and his team in action, “very impressive, Lieutenant, but they got you eventually.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Hektor, “Cara was particularly troublesome, as always.” Ayala beamed at this statement, Cara being a handpicked protégé of her own from the ranks of Shayetet-13, a highly secretive branch of the Israeli Defense Force.

Hektor went on, “It should be noted that Sergeant Osten cannot be faulted for being the first to fall. I did not, in fairness, give him much warning.”

“Neither will the enemy, sir,” Niels replied, with a mix of levity and seriousness, and Hektor let the point go, quietly proud of his team, as always.

“Well, if you are sufficiently recovered, gentlemen,” said Ayala, her tone changing, “we need to go over some final details before you leave.” Their stances changed with her tone, and they all focused on her next words.

“As you know, tomorrow morning you leave for your recon mission. You will not be given details of the other missions, either their dispositions or locations, for obvious reasons. But to pretend you are the only ones going in would be to insult your intelligences, and that of our enemy.

“What you do need to know, however, is that you will be deploying via parachute drop about two hundred miles east of Bryansk, near the border with Belarus and Ukraine. Now I know you are all reasonably passable in Russian, which is one of the reasons you have been picked for this assignment. You have also been equipped with one of the larger, field subspace tweeters. As well as connecting you to us, that unit will also be hacking local radio transmissions, and sending those signals back to us for interpretation. Hopefully we will be able to glean something about the enemies’ movements to go along with your own visual account of activity along the border with the former Soviet Bloc nations.

“Now,” she said somewhat severely, “as you may know from our last briefing, we have resumed limited over-flights of Russian airspace, despite our somewhat defunct treaty agreements, and in lieu of impending upgrades to our satellite equipment. If they notice these flights we will no doubt get some political backlash, though that is unlikely given the craft being used. But either way that is not your concern. I mention these flights only as a lead in to showing you how we are going to get you over the border.

“If you will follow me into the next hangar, gentlemen, I will show you why I have brought you here.”

She walked across the hangar floor to a far door, opening to an adjacent hangar whose main doors were closed, keeping prying eyes from what it harbored. The second hangar was in darkness, the only light coming from the dim overhead lights in the hangar they were stepping out of, and barely illuminating the floor just inside the door they were stepping through. Instinctively, Hektor switched to his suit’s sensors, hairs bristling at the sudden lack of available information.

But the sensors were struggling as well. The walls to his left and right he could sense, but his feeds, sensitive as they were, were unable to give him any information on the center of the darkened space. A cloud seemed to mire his ‘view’ there, not invisibility so much as a shifting view. Even his infrared sensors were useless, swamped by an all-pervading coolness that made that view moot as well.

Switching back to his radar and motion sensors, what he saw could only be described as a visible fog-of-war; a tangible lack of information seemed to hover in front of him. Without conscious decision, he stepped back and went weapons hot, his helmet clamping in front of his face. His team followed his example, the ones who had already come through the door starting to spread out along the walls, and the ones behind activating their sensors as their suits told them their CO had switched to Contact Mode.

But even as adrenalin started to pump afresh in their veins, Quavoce was sending a signal to them all. He had the encryption code to their subspace transmissions, and could tap into their team’s quasi-speech. Sensing their alarm, he calmed them.

Quavoce:
‘no need to worry, spezialists, your sensors’ inability to pinpoint the contents of this room should not be a source of concern to you. in fact, it should be a source of great comfort.’

Ayala closed the door behind the last of Hektor’s team, only her hard won trust in the alien Agent standing next to her making her comfortable being in total darkness with such potent warriors.

CO Gruler:
‘¿what is it, quavoce? ¿is that stealthing? i’ve never seen anything like it. not that i can see it now, either, for that matter.’

His team chuckled humorlessly at the joke, their attention fixed on whatever they were not seeing in the big hangar. Hektor was tentatively stepping forward toward whatever was generating the nothingness in front of him when, out of nowhere, a new voice answered his question.