The Lost Stars: Tarnished Knight

When Morgan advised caution, it was uncharacteristic enough to emphasize how important it was to listen to that opinion. “All right. Twenty-four hours. President Iceni and I will spin out discussions with Dun to help keep her distracted. I don’t want to hear from either one of you again until you’re in control of that facility and calling in to tell me.”

“I can run you a tight-beam link to the assault-force data feeds,” Malin offered. “Slightly time-delayed because it’ll have to run through relays to keep Dun’s people from spotting it, but we need to do that anyway for team coordination, and the link should be safe from any intercept.”

That was tempting, especially since he would have to sit here while they faced danger without him. Drakon nodded. “Thanks. Make that happen.”

* * *

ICENI had proven adept at stringing along Colonel Dun, dangling major concessions continually just out of reach. Drakon had found himself increasingly admiring her skills. That didn’t equate to trusting her, of course. In fact, watching how well she spun Dun made Drakon wonder how well he was being spun or could be spun if Iceni decided that was necessary.

He hadn’t been able to monitor the forces going up piecemeal in shuttles and boosters, packed in with normal shipments. If Dun was tracking anything, it would be whatever Drakon was watching.

It wasn’t a major assault by any means. Colonel Dun only had about forty soldiers under her command on the facility, and those were locals whose experience and training were both limited. Against that, Malin and Morgan were leading two assault teams of fifteen commandos each, all the soldiers highly trained veterans. If not for the risk of something heavy being dropped on the planet, Drakon wouldn’t have had any concerns about the outcome. But that one concern was a huge one.

An alert signal pulsed on his desk. Taking a long, slow breath, Drakon linked to the incoming signals and a multipaned window opened before him with views from the assault force.

He concentrated, blocking out all else, focusing only on the vids before him which portrayed the images seen from the stealth suits being used by the commandos. Twelve panes in the window. Two of those panes were from Malin and Morgan. The other ten marked section leaders, each controlling a team of two other commandos plus themselves.

About half of the commandos were already on the facility, some popping open specially designed crates to emerge inside warehouse compartments, others on the outside of the facility in the cold emptiness of space, the remainder coming in on long leaps from neighboring orbital locations, their stealth suits keeping them as invisible as the ingenuity of humans could devise. Malin’s head turned, his range of vision sweeping across a stretch of utilitarian fixtures that marked one section of the outer shell of the facility. Though invisible to others in their suits, the links to their fellows allowed the commandos to be “seen” by Malin as ghostly images painted on the exterior view.

Morgan’s group had also reached the facility and spread out along other portions, phantoms flitting carefully toward their targets. One of the section leaders passed a security camera watching that part of the exterior, the camera blindly tracking across the commando without pause.

The sections had reached accesses leading into the facility at different points. Some were air locks for maintenance workers to use when repairs were done, some were vents and tunnels never intended for human use. In some cases, commandos already inside cracked the air locks for their fellows. Everywhere else, the small, complex devices still known as skeleton keys after some sort of ancient means of opening locked doors were placed against key points and began breaking access codes and manipulating security bolts until barriers swung open.

Commandos began entering, each covering the others with ready weapons, some now in lighted passageways within the facility, others in still-darkened areas cluttered with canisters and boxes where only the occasional robotic minion trundled past with single-minded focus on its particular task.

It had all been silent up to now, almost unreal, as the phantom figures barely seen on the helmet displays of their fellow commandos moved without a word through the plan they had memorized and uploaded into their suits’ tactical systems. But the commandos in the passageways could now hear the sounds of human activity, while those in maintenance and storage areas could detect dull thuds and thumps being transmitted through the structure of the facility.

A supervisor whose head was bent over her personal unit came walking around a corner and right past one section of commandos who silently parted to make way for her. She paused, raised her head with a puzzled expression, then concentrated on the unit in her hand again as she walked on down the passage.