Chapter 11
Author's Note: Thanks for everyone's ongoing support, and especially my two-woman Wrecking Kru, leave your sanity at the door and MauMauKa. I'm sorry this is sort of a "travel" chapter, but it had to be done. Enjoy, boeties! I have used a lot of information from the wonderful book "Living in Space" by Giovanni Caprara; it's a must-read for anyone wanting to know the real science behind Elysium.
It was as if the ordeal at the compound had been just a nightmare. The automatic weapons fire, antiaircraft noise, and chaos of Jozi were left behind in seconds. The Raven streaked upward through the night sky, Crowe keeping the glowing lights of Elysium dead-center in their sights.
"We got out of there just in time, boss," Drake said, as if to reassure himself that they really had made it out. He'd taken the seat next to the unconscious girl, who whimpered under her breath to someone only she could see. Drake stroked her golden hair with a nervous hand. "Don't wanna have to go through that again, eh?"
Kruger ignored him. He stood silently to one side, brooding, holding onto a hanging strap with a death's grip. They'd been lucky in their escape. Their luck might not hold. All three of them were exhausted, hungry, and physically beaten down. Not the scenario he'd choose for an ideal assault. Definitely not one without intel, radio contact, or advance scouting. "You getting through yet?" he barked at Crowe. They were starting to climb up near the top of the stratosphere, the sky turning a still deeper shade of black outside. So far, the heat shields and the crudely welded doors were holding.
"Nothing. It's like the torus isn't even there," Crowe admitted. "They're either all asleep, boss, or the insurgents did something to it. Or maybe the defense shield is still causing the interference. Whatever way, all the signals are jammed. I tried every possible frequency short of sending fokken smoke signals."
"ETA to the Grootwiel?"
"Fifteen minutes. But we're going in the back way, so let's say twenty-five."
It was something Kruger had often thought, and once brought up to the Defense Secretary during one of their infrequent, clandestine meetings: Elysium, for all its power and glory, had very lackluster defenses. President Patel, and all his moffie predecessors, had insisted on droid-only security forces for the torus, adamant that human soldiers like Kruger and his squadron were unreliable, erratic, and "compromised Elysium's integrity." Any illegal ships that got out of Earth's atmosphere and flew up toward Elysium-and there were many- had to be shot down not from the habitat itself, but from the planet below, because the damn NIMBYs who lived there didn't want missile silos blocking their view of the lake or the orchard.
Droids could be shut down or reprogrammed, in fact, quite easily so with the data the insurgents had gotten from him. A well-trained, experienced man couldn't. How's that fokken integrity of yours now, eh? Now that you're about to take it up the arse from a bunch of flea-bitten slum rats because you didn't want proper fortifications?
There was something else on Kruger's mind besides the compromised, weak defense systems. A small detail he knew he'd overlooked….the kind of detail which could doom a hastily-put-together plan like this. Even something as small as a paper clip, when traveling at high enough velocity, could cause catastrophic damage to objects in space. Was that it?
"Boss, I don't think she's doing so well," called Drake from the bank of seats, and then Kruger suddenly realized his oversight.
The re-entry codes. The ones the girl said she'd stolen from God knew where. That's what she'd said; that they were going in disguised as a droid-crewed waste scow. If they didn't have those codes, the insurgents would know they were coming, and they would shoot first and ask questions later. He had no idea how to download them off her comm pad, and doubted his men did either. And without the exo-suit, direct plugin wasn't a possibility either. Fok…I can't get away from the little nagmerrie for more than five minutes.
Kruger made his way over to them slowly; the ship was pulling out of its steep vertical climb and stabilizing again as they entered the edges of space. It was a feeling he'd gotten used to over the years but never truly enjoyed. Nor would he ever get used to the strange feeling of artificial gravity aboard the aircars and shuttles: at four-fifths that of Earth's gravity, it gave him a weird feeling of vertigo, which was now made worse by his chemically-induced nausea.
He was no real judge, but the girl did look unwell. Pale skin made even paler, a thin sheen of sweat on her brow, shuddering beneath her oversize jacket. "Dunno what's wrong with her. It's like she came down with a cold or something. Only I don't think it is," Drake said, worry in his voice. "Should I get a first aid kit out? Get her some pills?"
"No. Just wake her the fok up." Kruger looked down at the pitiful little figure of Lorelei with disdain. There were any number of things she could've come down with on Earth. It was not only a shithole, it was a shithole crawling with all kinds of diseases. And the girl had never set foot off the torus before. That was a disaster waiting to happen.
So why, if she can overcome a grenade wound the size of my fokken hand without so much as a scratch, can't she get over this? Strange.
"C'mon, meisie. Time to wakey-wakey," Drake nudged her gently. Lorelei groaned and curled more tightly into a ball. She stirred but didn't awaken when he shook with more force. "Boss, a little help here?"
Kruger remembered what had happened the last time he'd touched the girl. That strange, golden haze that felt like afterglow, and yet was so much more. That couldn't happen again, though some part of him was darkly curious enough to wonder what would happen if it did. Just not now. "Fine," he grunted, and pushed at her midsection hard with one booted foot.
"Oh. Hey." Lorelei yawned and stretched in the confines of her seat. "Can you sing me that pretty 'Siemboppa' song again? I just wanna sleep," she said drowsily, drawling out the last word.
Drake shot Kruger a look of horrified disbelief. "Oh, seriously, boss. You didn't. Not that one?"
"She wouldn't shut up. It was either that or cut out her fokken larynx," Kruger said dryly. "Now, about those entry codes. You said…" Lorelei had already started to snore again. "For Chrissakes, Drakey, I'm not asking you much, but keep her the fok awake. Get her some more of that blue water kak. Anything."
From Lorelei's backpack, Drake took out the last bottle of the precious vita-water. Only a few sips remained, which he made her swallow while he held up her little head. "There's a good girl. Make you feel right as rain," he assured her, though he didn't really believe it. "You listen up to what Oom Kruger here says, all right? It's important."
"Mmm…okay." Lorelei was still sleepy-eyed, but the trickle of liquid had revived her for the moment. She sat up and blinked.
"Ten minutes and closing, boss. Still no contact," Crowe said over the roar of the engines. "You want me to go into a holding pattern? I'm not sure we have the fuel for more than one or two tries."
Time was truly running out now. They would appear on the outer perimeter radar as a manned ship any minute. "Keep your current trajectory until I say otherwise. We're going into sector 9-9, the main reactor. You know the way," Kruger ordered. Turning to Lorelei, he tried to twist his dark scowl into something even slightly more pleasant. Not that it matters with this one; she's either stupid, which I doubt, or she's just not afraid of me, in which case she's just naive. "Get us one of those codes. And be quick about it. You heard what he said," he told her, pulling the Dragonfly pad from his cargo pocket and handing it to her.
Lorelei fixed him with that eerie, soul-scrutinizing look of hers. Their faces were only inches apart. She seemed to be staring at something just above his head, and she wasn't looking at the comm. "It looks like you have bad dandruff. Or maybe lice," she announced solemnly after a moment, pointing to what she imagined to be the offending insects in Kruger's hair. "Do you have lice?"
"Not right now, I don't." His voice was low and dangerous behind his gritted teeth. "The codes."
"Why don't you just shave your head, like Mr. Crowe? Then you wouldn't even have to worry about it."
If this girl wasn't worth millions of credits, I'd cut her throat for this. She just doesn't know when to shut up. "Because then I'd look like a complete tietkop like him," he snapped. Ignoring Drake's snort of laughter, Kruger pointed a finger right back at her. "Last chance, meisie. Give me these codes and stop fokking around, or else I can't promise I'll be nice anymore."
"Okay. No need to be so pushy." The girl's hands flew over the device like those of a concert pianist. She really was an artist with this stuff…and what was more, she seemed to be interfacing directly with her pad: the very motions of her hands, and not keystrokes, directing the streams of data. Kruger had never seen anyone do that with a top of the line model, much less an old piece of junk like this. "Which one do you want? The one that starts with 'Mike Foxtrot' sounds good…"
"Anything. Hurry the fok up."
She kept at it, palm twisting and moving back and forth over the pad. Finally, after what seemed like forever, there was a soft beep with an automated, mechanical voice. 'Non-organic re-entry code accepted. Droid vessel entering Elysium airspace…'
"So what does that mean?" Drake asked. He'd been holding his breath without realizing it.
"It means," Kruger said, suddenly wishing he hadn't killed his last three comms men, "that we're not gonna get blown out of the fokken sky, or bounce off the shields like a piece of space junk." It wasn't his area of expertise, but he knew at least that much.
Lorelei nodded wearily. "Yeah. At least I think so. I've only ever simmed this one, and most of the time…" She let out a long sigh. "I kinda crashed."
"You 'kinda crashed?'" Kruger turned away and threw up his hands in disgust. "You're fokken telling me this now?" More than ever, he wanted to clamp his hands around the girl's neck and squeeze every last breath from her. Only the promise of that fat reward, and the look of shock he could imagine on her aunt's normally icy face, kept him from doing so.
Drake put a hand on his shoulder. "C'mon, boss. She got us the code. Now we gotta do our part, eh?"
The fact that his men had warmed to the girl infuriated him even more. Kruger snarled at him. "Don't fokken touch me, boet. Just shut up and get your weapons ready."
"Roger that." Drake quickly got out of the way and started retrieving the guns and armor they still had from the appropriate locker.
"Five minutes, boss." Crowe steered the ship ever closer toward the torus, which loomed large in the readout screen. "Still on a complete blackout for comms. Lights are still on, though, and no indication of bio or chem weapons. No radioactive signature, either. Our scanners took a beating down there, though, so what do you make of that?"
It could mean any number of things, Kruger knew. He grudgingly had to hand it to this group: they were patient. Too many of the scum who flew up to Elysium thought it was a good idea to crash their shuttles into someone's backyard…but then, the Homeland forces were on them in seconds, and maybe a handful of them got what they'd come for before being cuffed and deported. That wasn't subtlety. Kgosi's group were hackers…and good ones…the kind who'd figured out the true way into the heart of the torus. They weren't after med-bay access or weapons or even money. They were different. What had that kaffir woman said? Something about 'it's our time now?"
"Run through the enemy's data stream again," Kruger ordered the girl. "Pull up all their kak from the last six..no, twelve… hours. Give me anything that looks out of the ordinary."
"What do we say?"
"NOW, dammit!"
Lorelei actually jumped in her seat, eyes wide. "Okay. Just gimme a sec…" She scrolled through the multitude of code, looking for something, anything.
They were perhaps three minutes from their target: a small, well-hidden shaft on the far side of the torus' bottom two spokes which led directly into the nuclear facility. For years Elysium had gotten the vast majority of its energy from the millions of solar cells on its outer rim; that was enough to keep the lights on, the armaments factory running, and the champagne on ice. The nuke reactor had been controversial from the start, though there had never been an accident in a hundred years, and only droids ever ventured to those bowels. It had been put in to help run the biggest drain in the habitat: the semi-porous, invisible shield which kept the air in and the deadly space radiation out, and as a backup source of power in case of emergency or damage to the solar cells. It was relatively clean and efficient, using the helium-3 lunar isotope method the Brazilian Avibras firm had patented decades earlier. But in Elysian terms, it was still the sewer, the backwater, the outhouse.
Just the sort of place rats love to go. That's it.
"We're getting close," Crowe said through clenched teeth. And he meant it: the narrow opening had been designed for tiny scows, not Raven-class gunships. They'd only have a few feet to spare.
"Hurry the fok up! I'm not asking again," Kruger said, speaking to both Lorelei and his pilot.
As Crowe flew them ever nearer, Lorelei frowned. She was up way past her usual bedtime, which normally would have thrilled her. She'd gotten the mercenaries out of prison all on her own, saved them from the bad guys, helped fix their ship. She'd even made them take baths. But no matter what she'd done so far, it had made Kruger mad. He seemed impossible to please. He was, she thought, a lot like her aunt that way. Young ladies use their manners. They say 'please' and 'thank you.' They hurry the fok up. She tried not to giggle, knowing that would make things worse. Then she spotted something in the feed. It was a word she remembered vaguely from one of her downloads, but didn't really know.
"Mr. Drake? What's a 'tempest?'" she called over to the Oryx gunner, thinking she'd have better luck with him than Kruger.
"Sort of a storm, I think. Why, meisie? Where are you seeing that?" He came over and looked at the comTm screen.
Kruger was on them in an instant. "That's it," he hissed, pulling the pad out of her grasp and pointing. "Ag sies, that's their plan! Tempest... that portable EMP device they used on us before. They must have more than one, and if the shields are down, that's all they'll need to cripple this station. It's primitive, all right, but it's brilliant. They must have flown in with the same idea; to use the non-bio codes. That's how they weren't spotted right away. How the fok could I have overlooked that?"
The pad's auto-voice gently announced, 'Entering clearance-orange zone. Elevated levels of radiation detected.' The tunnel had swallowed the ship whole; ahead was only a dim, iridescent green glow. "Should I turn around, boss?" Crowe said nervously, already knowing that it was too late. The Raven's fuel cells were all but depleted; they wouldn't even be able to get to the torus' outer rings to crash-land. They had to keep going until they found a place wide enough to land.
"Shit. This isn't good, is it?" Beside Kruger, Drake swallowed hard. He'd been subject to the same torture, the same excruciating pain caused by the deceptively small gadget.
Think, Kruger told himself. They may have the numbers, and they may have the weapons…but we have experience. There's still a plan…now stick to it.
"Get out the suits, Drakey. Now." When he spoke, it was strangely calm. That always happened right before he went into battle; it was like the preternatural aura of tranquility before the most violent hurricane. The storm itself wouldn't be far behind. And when it finally arrived, he would no longer be calm.
He'd enjoy himself again, taste the blood of his enemies, revel in their terror. After all that had happened on this day, Kruger felt like he deserved at least that much.
"You mean the greenies?" On board the ship were, among other useful things, a set of Elysian-designed hazmat suits. They weren't body armor and they certainly weren't exo-suits, but they would provide protection against radiation. Like a second skin, they were light and maneuverable, their breathing apparatus a light plexiglass shield worn over the face.
"Yes. And make it quick, eh?"
"Brace yourselves. I can't see a damn thing in here, and the scopes are blind this far inside!" Crowe warned from the pilot box. With a horrible scraping and squealing, the ship touched down at last, sending Kruger and Drake staggering sideways. Kruger was lucky and managed to stay upright; Drake wasn't. He spun hard into one of the ship's walls, and the loud crack as his left arm broke was audible even over the din. Several of the alarms, including the fuel cell indicator, the life support system, and the outer shield, wailed in harmony.
The wounded Raven wasn't going anywhere else. Wherever they were going, it would be on foot, or in another ship, from here on out.
Strapped into her seat, Lorelei hadn't screamed or even cried during the crash. She sat still, holding her breath and closing her eyes, as if willing all of it to be over. When she opened them again, she heard the alarms still blaring. She was home…sort of."Are we okay?" she asked, in a tiny voice, of no one in particular. When none of the men answered her, she tried to struggle out of her seat with little success. "Hey, guys, a little help here!" she cried, louder this time, but was still ignored.
"That's as rough a landing as I ever wanna make," said Crowe, exhaling deeply. "You boys all right back there? Don't think you were strapped in."
"Never better. Let's get the fok out of here," Kruger answered. He was sick of the artificial gravity, sick of breathing either polluted or canned air, and sick of standing around waiting. Now that they were finally back on the Grootwiel, he'd have his chance. "Drakey? How are you, boet?"
Up against the wall, Drake groaned. "Fok, boss. I've had better. At least it's not my gun arm, eh? Third time breaking that left one, go figure." He held up his good right arm. "Put me in a med-bay and I'll be just fine," he added, though his bearded face was drawn.
Lorelei had finally managed to release the harness on her seat; she fell in a small heap to the floor. She was tired, felt sick, and desperately wanted more of her vita-water, but she also knew she needed to help. Confidently, the way she'd seen her aunt do so many times, she walked right up to where Kruger and Drake stood. "You have to let me help you," she said, the persistence returning again. "I promise. I won't get in the way."
Stunning her hadn't worked. Nor had locking her in the bunk. She was annoying, but she was smart. Kruger knew something else was needed. In a split second, he made his decision. "You really want to help?" he said, his tone dripping sarcasm.
Lorelei had barely opened her mouth before his hands shot out and struck at her throat, the softest part between the clavicle and windpipe. It was a move that could, and often did, incapacitate people permanently. The flash of the golden connection was there, for an instant, bright and vivid… then died away again as quickly as it had come. It was enough to get Kruger's blood flowing faster, and it wasn't what he'd had in mind.
But there was no more time. The girl was in his way…and she had a citizen implant, didn't she? She could be fixed.
As before with the stun gun, the girl fell down, unconscious. Still breathing, but shallowly.
"Christ, boss. Did you have to do that?" Drake said. "She's just a fokken kid."
"Wasn't that oke in Nairobi the last one who…" Crowe started, but didn't finish.
"I don't think you two realize this," Kruger stormed, wheeling on them, "but we have a huge fokken problem here. We don't need her. Fok, we'll come back for her if we have to, claim our reward, but our first priority is to kill the enemy before this station falls out of the sky. Do I make myself clear?" All the calm was gone now; the hurricane had reached land.
"Yes, boss," they answered in unison.
"Now get your weapons before I fokken kill you myself!"
To Be Continued