Chapter 22

For an alien and a human, Bogg Rhul and I were sitting embarrassingly close together, hunkered down as we were in the back of an armored mobile command truck. The high-tech vehicle was parked in a small, lonely alley in the city, in the heart of that awful dust cloud that had sent me reeling several days before. The alley itself was located several blocks east of the Atlas rimonium mining facility.

If the back of the truck even had windows, we would not have bothered to look outside them; it was well past midnight, and black as ebony outside. There had been a slight breeze with a modest chill to it at the time I had a chance to feel it. But that had been a while ago. For the last couple of hours, I had been cramped in this tiny, busy space, yawning constantly and left to stretching my legs the best I could by merely straining them.

Bogg and I were squished into this sardine can with two electronics technicians and Major Brianna Chesney, who was in command. She had wanted to lead the raid on the Atlas facility, but Sash and Lt. Col. Thompson had taken those honors for themselves. The major's hair was pulled into a tight bun underneath her commando cap, her face painted a thick, coal black. Her pulse rifle and equipment were stashed nearby, as well as a backup team of commandos in another vehicle. She was ready to go and dearly wanted to, from what I could tell. But unless something went terribly wrong, she would have to settle for running this command post several blocks away from the action, a command post which served as the infiltration team's eyes and ears, and which coordinated the intelligence coming in from two other reconnaissance teams scoping the facility's perimeter.

Chesney and her technicians wore simple little earpieces, connecting them wirelessly to the communications system between each other and the combat teams moving about in the night. The technicians' hands moved constantly across their consoles, switching views, reporting conditions, and relaying orders.

I was leaning back with my eyes closed. With the help of one of the technicians, I was able to plug my HUD right into their system. I had activated my little desktop in my field of vision, asked for a scan of local frequencies, and locked onto the scrambled signal Sash’s people were using. The technician had then given me access to a software-based descrambler so the signals became intelligible. I had a lot of cool things to look at. I had the audio feed between the command post and the combat teams, so I could hear them talking to each other. I had medical readings on the combat teams: by clicking on a few icons in my HUD, I could view, in real-time, the heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, perspiration gradient, and even brainwave patterns of any member of the team. I had pinned Sash’s medical profile in the corner, just because I respected him so damn much.

The best part about it all, though, was the video feed. Each member of the infiltration team was wearing AWG, or All-Wave Goggles. It was a funny headset kind of thing that draped over their eyes and made them look like jewelry store robots with permanent loupes soldered into their heads. But these goggles were sophisticated. The user could easily switch between modes, the goggles displaying the user’s view in a variety of frequencies. The infiltration team had been sticking with infrared so far. I knew because I had access to everything they were seeing, fed right to my desktop. As exhausted as I was, having pulled an all-nighter planning and strategizing this raid with them, I was having a blast now watching the operation in first-person view, as if I was right there with them. I could see the ground bouncing around as they jogged, then skulked, toward the compound. I could hear their labored breath, hear their sotto voce commands, and monitor their heart rates.

Bogg didn’t have anything like the HUD we Earth Citizens had. He was left to a cheap pair of headphones one of the technicians had given him. Still, he had been bravely listening to the operation from the very first moment, with the kind of attention usually found among sports fanatics during the championship.

Sash and Lt. Col. Thompson were personally leading the four-man infiltration team. Their objective was to conduct a silent and successful break-in of the Atlas facility. Once inside they would find and retrieve Geelan and the reputed stash of Koralizine, bring both of them out of the compound, and engage with us in a quick exfiltration out of town.

They knew almost exactly where Geelan was, thanks to the intelligence provided by their insiders, spies who had also done their best to create an optimal environment for breaking and entering tonight. This included everything from engineeering artificial malfunctions of locks and intrusion detection equipment to incapacitating guards and staff in our key target areas.

Although Geelan's location was known, they had no idea where the Koralizine would be stored. Our obvious guess was the infirmary, which they easily knew the location of.

We had talked about all the alternatives Koralizine might be found, if not in the infirmary. I had never set up a rimonium mining facility, but I knew the generic, production-line layouts used by Atlas and we were able to correlate that information with the intelligence they already had to guess at and map out the most obvious places. We had done an enormous amount of work pulling together this raid in such a short amount of time, and I was grateful. If Geelan had been honest all along, and they had tortured him to find out where his secret vein of rimonium was, and if they had already sent off half the Marine company with a contingent of miners to claim it, time for me was of the absolute essence. Rescuing Geelan didn’t do much for Sash, but he was definitely interested in the Koralizine, and in certain other benefits, like seeing the facility from the inside himself, testing and probing weaknesses. Personally, I think he was treating this like a dry run of a full-fledged occupation, and it was why he had insisted he personally lead the mission, which didn’t make sense to the rest of us.

Things had been tense and harried up to this point. But the four-man team was inside the facility, and had successfully entered the main building without being detected. It was dark and quiet, with only a few patrols around and inside the building.

The building had a simple layout. It was a large, rectangular building. The entire front of the building was office space. There was a mess hall and kitchen on one side, in the middle. Behind it, on the left rear corner, was a janitorial and storage area, which led beyond into a large equipment warehouse and loading docks behind the building. Running along the rest of the rear side of the building were bunks and quarters for the miners and staff, with the infirmary occupying the right rear corner.

Sash and his team had entered the building on the right. As a group they stealthily passed by one large room of sleeping miners. At that point the group split up. Sash and Sgt. Drake Mueller turned into the infirmary to begin their sweep for the Koralizine. Lt. Col. Blake Thompson and Sgt. Nick Reblic continued down the corridor, heading to the other end of the building. They were going to retrieve Geelan, who was reported to be chained up in a dirty little room in the rear corner of the equipment warehouse.

Watching this stuff live, on my HUD, was a tense and fully engaging experience. But I can’t imagine what it was like for those guys in the building when all hell broke loose…