"Those Who Put Out Fires"
They were called Blue Team from the very beginning to their very end.
Rochester had always insisted on calling themselves "Code Blue". It somewhat described their job, but was still inaccurate. Besides, they merely had Orange to Red-Orange status.
LaSalle, the jazz fan, suggested "the Blues," which was how they were often referred to in passing, but sounded too informal and whimsical to be their official name.
Barrington dubbed them "Deep Blue". That label was also inaccurate, with its connotations of digital sentience and gigacorporate control. Their outfit was merely under the influence of the corps.
Blooms, the jingoist, named them "Blue Shield." It wasn't bad, but a shield suggests a large, blunt object utilized to block sharp projectiles. The team was entirely antithesis to that idea.
Names with naturalistic connotations were not brought up, such as "Bluebacks," "Bluebootles," or "Bluefins." Neither were aristo phrases like "Bluenoses" or "Bluebloods." Gems like "sapphire," "lapis lazuli," and "turquoise" were immediately deemed effeminate and fit only for true army boys.
Bluecoats would have been a good name, but it seemed too general, as if to suggest thousands instead of sixteen to twenty. And there were few in the military who did not wear coats, jackets, or tunics of that color.
So, Blue Team. That was the name of their elite classified counter-terrorist stealth force.
Thorne rolled that idea around in his head as the transport's retrorockets fired. It always did him good to think about mundane, irrelevant matters before a mission. Thank the stars he had scored low enough to avoid Secret Ops. God only knows what the gen-spliced super-super soldier-spies thought- if they did, at all. And thank Terra that he had scored high enough to miss joining the mission-crazed commandoes of the Mariners. Based on the philosophy of their "r"-less terrestrial brethren, except on steroids, their lot was to fight and die in null-G for absolute victory.
Blue Team, on the other hand, was a "Tactical Stealth Force," somewhere between the special forces of the mundane non-stealth and the super-super special soldiers of "Deep Black" clearance- come to think of it, Secret Ops was a veritable military of its own, connected to the Colonial Authority like a giant tumor hiding an underdeveloped twin. Thorne, a mere super special soldier, was permitted an actual life, but it was to occur only on base. Maybe when his term is over, and he had undergone the treatments to help him sleep better at night and to forget classified info, he could return home with a good pension and a vague feeling of patriotism. But for now he was encouraged to remain human within the context of the war. So if that meant he could have Zen thoughts and think about other things besides the mission, he did. He could even have compassion. As long as it didn't impede combat performance.
The other elite classified counter-terrorist stealth infiltrators stopped chattering as the blockade runner snuck behind the ring-shaped orbital and latched on. The ship was deviously designed. No war had ever occurred between Olde Earth and Terra yet, but the military had already planned for every possible aspect of war. The runner, with its stateart features, was capable of both eluding gunboat sentries and secretly deploying an anti-terrorist force.
The ship stopped.
Machinery outside whirled noiselessly as a hole was drilled into the side of the station. There was always the risk of the enemy on the other side, but even if they lost the element of surprise, the hostages would be safe.
The commander, a veteran named Cadsen, stood and addressed the fifteen others.
"Alright, caddies. Listen up. Last review of the rules of engagement. O'Leary was handling the negotiations, and he kept dropping hints that if the governor and his family aren't released, the tangs aren't gonna know what hit 'em. So, they're expecting a full force of Mariners to pop onscreen, rape a dock, and bust in guns blasting."
The others grinned. O'Leary was a nervous, pompous bureaucrat hired for his callousness to discretion and innocence of gracefulness. He was often given bogus briefings before the missions, since it was expected that his genuine inability would "reveal" the military's secret plans.
"On the other hand, these aren't your typical tangs. They're experienced mercenaries. Mostly guerre, but a few ex-guild assassins. All trained for shootouts in null-G. They're keeping watch in case the military pulls a stealth mission. Well, here we are."
"Body count?" asked Thorne.
"Ninty-five," replied the comm.
Cadsen nodded to the other squad leaders. "They expect the military to hyperspace the logistics: have multiple teams get in at multiple insertion points. They think we're going to storm the station. Little do they know we don't give a rat's mass either way- saving the governor is just a good PR thing. We'll have multiple squads, entering at one insertion point. This is an empty storage room. We get into squads and head for squad targets. Alpha and Beta will go clock, Gamma and Delta will go contra. Got that?"
The others all nodded. "Shoot them all," continued Cadsen. "Knock out all security before entering the hub. No witnesses. Their leadership isn't desperate, and they know we'll give them house arrest if no one gets hurt. Mercs are another story. I'll take Alpha into the hub first. Ready?"
Blue Team responded by pulling their masks down. All were made anonymous, now, faceless save for the eyelike light projectors on their faces. They locked and loaded.
Cadsen smiled and pulled down his mask. "Ready," spoke his heavily distorted voice.
The laser ceased cutting. A circular hole was made in the wall, connecting to the pressurized docking tube extending from the side of the transport.
Of the four Tactical Strike Forces, Red Team was the most gung ho. Composed of promoted Mariners who proved their mettle, they were actually quite reserved compared to the commandoes; they were akin to a typical terrestrial team, since they were trained to sneak and shoot, not run in with guns blazing as everyone had saw them.
Blue Team was actually the second most confrontational. The TSFs were effective because they truly possessed a lot of tact. Green was a recon and sniper team which usually performed best in orbitals with lots of open space. In fact, they were usually instructed not to engage or fire at the enemy unless they were at least half a click away. Yellow was the strangest of all. Trained for pure stealth, they were often unarmed on missions and ordered to not only not attack the enemy at all, but to never let the enemy know that they were ever there even after the mission. An often repeated excuse at the base when a belonging was lost or a notice overlooked was that the Yellows had sneaked into the barracks and surreptitiously messed around. It was a joke, true, but one had to wonder if Yellow Team was ever unleashed in the civilian burbs to tamper with the possessions of ordinary citizens. After all, how could anyone ever know?
And the four TSFs were of only moderately high secrecy within the conventional military. Only the comptrollers and their corporate buddies know what kind of capabilities lie at "Deep Black" status, in the Secret Ops, which was nearly a military of its own instead of a mere branch.
The short docking tube opened to a closet of supplies, spare parts, and ubiquitous of ubiquity- paperwork. Cadsen went in followed by his Alpha squad. Li Zhong followed with Beta, Grigori with Gamma, and finally LaSalle with Delta.
Sixteen elite classified counter-terrorist stealth infiltrators floated in the cramped closet, equipped with magnetic soles but preferring to operate in their choice medium. After they were all ready, Cadsen gave the "all's well" message back to control. Parsecs away, the grizzled old general nodded and flipped a switch at his console.
Inside their gear, electrical currents flowed as eldritch technology activated themselves, prompting thousands of streams of info and datum to appear on the fabric of the facemasks the stealth infiltrators wore. Besides navigational symbols on the margins of their vision, the infiltrators saw measurements of physical well-being, fluctuations of temperature and air composition in the room, and huge brackets around their teammates to dissuade friendly fire- and best targets over vulnerable body parts if they wanted to.
Cadsen slid open the door. A radar on the fringes of their masks detected two in the next room, both next to on the same side of the door. Easy.
He floated out, having pushed off a heavy case stacked with boxes of paperwork. He entered the hallway and caught the two mercenaries unaware, shooting both in the chest before the targeting software even reacted.
One fell backwards onto the top of the room, and the other spun slowly, prone in the air. Blue Team had entered the building as it always did: upside-down and inverted.
Contreras looked back to Cadsen. "Tango down!" he whispered.
"Two," replied the point man.
Thorne and the other two in Blue Team Alpha followed their point man, Contreras, toward the lift. Their squad acted as a point man to Blue Team Beta, whose members were heavier armored and slower. As the heavy gunner of his squad, Thorne kept close to Contreras while armed with a beanbagger along the 7.62mm military standard rifle.
Most of the tangs they encountered along the way were swiftly dealt with. Obviously their radio silence would soon be noticed, but that would just bring more guards. Since they weren't on an overt mission, the beanbagger Thorne had was an anti-surveillance weapon that neutralized all of the cameras in the area by creating a loop of the past ten minutes. Langley, the countersecurity expert and sniper, had found a terminal and created the same effect to the rest of the cameras on the entire station.
The mercenaries proved to be less adroit than expected. They were often on patrol alone or in pairs, and were neutralized together. None managed to retreat. Only one managed to fire off any shots with his loud, unsilenced assault gun by leaping and demagnetizing his shoes, flying towards the infiltrators, who swerved out of his way and caught him at the neck. The unmasked man choked a bit and spit before closing his eyes. The saliva streaked across Throne's mask. The guerre was dressed in a camo T with a military-styled vest instead of unspecified dark black with slingbleeng. A guerre.
Thorne wondered if he really believed in the seditionaries, or any of the dozen-odd groups against the Colonial Authority. Perhaps he was a rebel from Belt Battles, where the creaking giants of Olde Earth had thrown out their backs in one last show of nationalist glory. Either way, he was no match for the legitimates' armaments.
Most of the guerre were similarly dressed, some with arm bands, others with bandanas. As always, they were the same dusty gray that was antithesis to not just bonnie blue but the rainbow of elite classified counter-terrorist stealth forces and military intelligence security clearance levels of the establishment government. Their cause had many supporters, but it was only a slim minority of the population. On the frontier, there was always someone more depressing than you were.
This station, on the other hand, was antiseptic and silvery, the command center of a bourgeois official with cash to spare and debts owed by the poorer masses below. Apparently, this local chapter of seditionaries still held usury to be a crime, and, instead of just paying off the debts of the population, used the money from membership fees to buy arms and hire assassins, instead.
Thorne pondered this as he shot an assassin in the back. This schmill was smart enough to run, looking awfully uncool, uncalm, and uncollected despite his snappy black garments and his shiny alien gems. The guy fell forward and rose a meter in the air as his soles demagnetized. He looked quite comical, since to Thorne's point of view he was running on the ceiling.
The lift doors opened to two surprised guerre, one dressed in an astrosuit. He grabbed a lift wall, ducked, and pushed with his legs, propelling forward and skimming the ground above while shooting at Alpha squad below with a blaster. Contreras took out his slower friend inside the lift, while Thorne got the astrosuited glider above, his shot penetrating the suit at the neck. However, a blaster ray had struck Thorne at the joint on the reverse side of his right elbow as he had raised his rifle to shoot the flier.
The armor was breached. Thorne's arm was cut, but fortunately not sliced away. Most of the cut vessels had been cauterized by the laser, but in the meantime the heat had also scorched some others in the skin around the cut. He was still bleeding quite badly, and his numbness confirmed the alert inside his mask. A fine, red mist enveloped his face.
He saw perfect spheres of blood float all about him, and wondered if his life was trickling away with them. He then looked at his in-mask HUD. It was.
Squad leader Cadsen doubled as medic. He took out a patch from a small box at his belt and placed it gingerly onto Thorne's arm. The bleeding was staunched in seconds, and feeling returned to his arm. Cadsen took out a roll of Re-Armor™ and wrapped it around the exposed flesh, repairing the SKINsuit. They entered the elevator.
The entire floor had been cleared in 3:23:03 minutes. Radio check confirmed seventeen down so far.
Within the elevator, each man inwardly relaxed. Cadsen muttered a minor praise. Langley reloaded his sniper rifle. Thorne wondered if GAMDC would give him a medal for the wound. Definitely not, but at least they'd fix his arm completely.
Thorne was disgusted. These were the lawless who had even greater testicular fortitude than bug hunters and larger egos than pirates, yet were weak against mere technology. So much for jettisoning the guild for personal advancement. They were no match for Big Law.
En route to the main level, control sent a message to Cadsen. O'Leary was speaking to the seditionaries. They were showing no signs that they knew an invasion was happening. Beta and Delta both had infiltrators trained for subterfuge and mimicry. The enemy's communications was easy to crack.
Blue Team Alpha righted themselves on the next floor. All they had to do now was to eliminate as many tangs they could find around the rim before entering the hub. Beta, with more firepower, sought the quarters of the mercs. Gamma headed for the bridge. Delta was getting rid of escape pods, though control would probably destroy any as soon as they got at least a click away from the station.
They found the wrongly-dressed guerre and the black-clad assassins all out in the open. Neither was well-suited as guards. The former were killer in terrestrial woodland warfare; the latter were for hits and urban assaults. Their guns-for-hire mentality was all wrong for this operation. They fled when they could, leaving injured seditionaries behind. They cursed like angry children, stung from a big bad honeybee.
What they were good for was in null-G shootouts. Even more than veteran guerre, they liked to demagnetize their shoes and attempt aerial ballets. They were even dressed in trademark glasses with dark lenses- crimson red and radioactive green. Unfortunately, the hallways of the station were often too cramped for them to pull off their showy maneuvers, having forgotten that they show was for lighter corporate battles, that these weren't simply company police or militiamen. Firing wildly with semiautomatics and those wizardy modded blasters- globe wands?- many paid with shots to the limbs. Then again, they fared much better than the grunts they had out in the lower floors.
And so another floor was almost cleared. But by now the leadership must have gotten news that they were being attacked from within. Guerre armed with assault rifles and submachiners poured forth from passages leading to the hub. Switching to another mode, Thorne fired traps with his beanbagger, insect-sized mines that hovered or stuck to walls and exploded with the force of a fastball to the cranium when anyone got close. The four infiltrators huddled at one hall near to a hubdoor and now fired openly at anyone who got near. The guerre were getting desperate now, flying at them ineptly in null-G, helpless to any of Thorne's traps and Langley's sniper shots.
But in this wave, new assassins met them. Dressed in simple black, but without the jewelry, they moved swiftly in weightlessness, leaping from wall to wall like lizards, pushing off, spinning, zigzagging erratically. One almost got close enough to hit Contreras across the face with his globe wand, but was quickly shot. In response to the improved challenge, the Blue Team Alpha moved around in their little area, surrounded by fallen but floating assassins and guerre. Though more went around the rim to attack them from the rear, they were dispatched, too.
"Enter the hub, now."
Control's message was succinct and sweet. Blue Team Alpha quickly flew around the unconscious shields and into the passage to the hub. None challenged them. Security weapons would have been popping out from the walls now, but Langley had disabled them long ago.
Inside the hub was the communications center. Monitors covered the walls, and the governor and his family were bound and gagged at one corner. Of the leadership, only one had out a blaster and was threatening the hostages. At the other corner, one seditionary boss slumped against a static-filled monitor, a hole in his head. Blood floated around him. The rest of the leadership- six in all- were also armed and glared at the interlopers.
The angry, loathing seditionary leadership were an old batch of extremists. These were the men who had led their faction, who had charmed young men to die for them and sold poor men to cry for them. They probably had great accounts somewhere in the banks of Cibola on Terra or possibly in Switzerland. House arrest would be a happy time for them, as long as their neighbors didn't attack them.
The one threatening the hostages spoke. "Put do-"
Blue Team shot them all. Each had picked a head as they entered.
Cadsen floated to the hostages, who sat there googly-eyed and thankful. He took out a Morpheus Tas and shocked all of them. They would be okay within a few hours, but for now they were out of the way for the rest of the firefight.
Which was nearly over at that point. The squads reformed on another level and began boarding the last escape pod. Alpha did the securing, and Thorne was last to leave.
He took one last gaze at the hallways of the station. Nearly a dozen guerre and assassins floated there, many bleeding, all incapacitated. The Colonial Authority clean-ups would arrive in an hour, salvage it all, and cook up some story about how the local militia rescued them all, killing all of the terrorists in the process. Only one escaped.
He turned to board. Just then, he thought he saw movement at the corner of his eye.
A figure floated there, in a position somewhere between lotus and fetal.
Ninety-five.
The fellow was covered with a towel lit with holo-projectors and a temperature shield. Camouflage for sensor scans and true invisibility for the naked eye. His only trace was the shimmer he created whenever he moved. The thing must have cost a minor fortune on the black market. Even higher-up military could never afford to use such things.
This mercenary had bargained for his share, and joined this operation expecting ragtag colonial militia and gung ho Mariners. Not a Tactical Stealth Force. He couldn't have run while Gamma was destroying the escape pods. Now he had no choice but to hide.
Thorne silently congratulated his enemy for his brightness so far, and started to call-
A bright ring manifested in front of him. The assassin shot his blaster, angry to have been in this mission, angry to have faced a damn elite TSF, angry to have gotten himself into this fix in the first place. It hit the infiltrator in the squarely in the armor of his chest. Should have gone for a headshot. The SKINsuit was built to be stronger there.
Thorne spun his entire body as he flew backwards from the blast, his legs suddenly becoming parallel to the ground. He fired, the round hitting the towel at 640 meters a second, cutting a hole into the towel. Good guess, and the figure was hit in the arm and slammed back. Another shot from Thorne's rifle knocked the other arm against the wall. His towel flew away, revealing the rest of him, an assassin holding a sniping blaster.
His finger was still at the trigger. He squeezed off some shots at Thorne, who had quickly recovered, found a wall, and launched himself at the assassin. The assassin, furiously turned and spun, dodging hits but also missing. Thorne shot him again in the arm, and once through the transparent barrel of the blaster, shattering it into billions of ceramic pieces. The assassin writhed as the shards hit his face, cutting him slightly. His sunglasses were destroyed, a cloud of gold- rare color for an assassin.
Thorne floated up to him, switched his rifle to normal, and shot him between the eyes.
The tranquilizer dart slammed into his forehead at 640 meters a second, jarring his head, giving him a slight concussion along with the chemicals. The man grimaced and stared at the infiltrator for a full twenty seconds before closing his eyes. He had been hit multiple times by the automatic rifle mode, creating a mist of red that drenched a wall. Thorne checked the assassin, nodded, and branded him on the side of his face with a small stamp.
He returned to the pod.
"Mission successful," he told Cadsen. "Confirmed kills: None."
The salvage crews would pay special attention to the gold-glassed assassin. He had shown some talent. The rest was still inspected, nevertheless.
An entire station's worth of captives. No wonder they didn't send for Red Team.
And so the military's will be done, he thought as the pod flew away into the fields.
Back to home. But first the void.