Red Sky Dawning Read online

  Spotting a small alcove near a bookshelf, Danny stepped out of earshot of the others. “Sir, our LZ is in zone thirty-seven. Even if we bug out now, there’s no way we make that. Not with our cover guys already out.”

  “I know,” Noll said. “Rollins assured me, though, that if we can get you someplace safe long enough for a pickup, he’d send somebody. That’s why I’ve got Lt. Kang and the Niner boys carving out a makeshift LZ in zone twenty-three which, if you hurry, should be doable.”

  “What about the mine?” Danny asked.

  “Rollins says leave it,” Noll said. “He’s convinced we’ve done enough damage to put it out of commission, at least for the time being.”

  “Please,” Danny scoffed. “With all due respect to the colonel and his orbital scans, I’m down here on the ground, and I’m telling you, this place will be back up and running in a month if we let it stand. C’mon, sir, we’ve got these guys on the mat. Let’s keep ’em there.”

  “I hear what you’re saying, son,” Noll said, “but we’ve got our orders. Now get your people the hell out of there and come home.”

  Danny ruffled the back of his regulation blond crew cut then cued his HUD telemetry for a digital survey of the scene outside. At present, he and his unit were holed up roughly six hundred meters north of the entrance to the mine, and while zone twenty-three was definitely within reach from here if they took off now, Danny still hated the notion of leaving a job unfinished—particularly one with this much potential for coming back to bite them. There’s gotta be a way to pull this off. Seeing the smug look on Kean’s face, he made his decision.

  “Tucker, you still with me?” Noll asked over the comm.

  “Yes, sir,” Danny said. “Tell Kang and his people we appreciate them holding the door for us. Just give us another minute to tie off some loose ends here, and we’ll start heading his way. Hurricane out.”

  Ordering Reegan to wrap up his work in the data core, Danny signaled Anders, his husky second in command, to join him in the study.

  “What’s going on, Top?” Anders asked once they were alone in the alcove.

  “Keystone LORASS has three Alystierian destroyers on approach,” Danny said. “They’ll be here in just over twenty-five minutes, and Rollins is ordering an emergency evac of the system.”

  Anders rested his rifle on a burly shoulder. “So we’re just leaving the mine intact for the grays? That could come back to haunt us down the line.”

  “Yes it could. That’s why I’ve got no intention of leaving it. Not intact, anyway.”

  Anders arched a dark eyebrow. “If you don’t mind me asking, sir, you got a plan for that?”

  “I’ll figure it out,” Danny said. “Right now, though, I just need you to take our guys and get to zone twenty-three. Noll’s got us an alternative ride out of here if we can get there on time.”

  “Excuse me for saying so, sir, but Reegan can handle that just fine on his own. If it’s all the same, I’d prefer to hang back with you.”

  “I appreciate that, Xeek, but I—”

  “All due respect, sir, but unless you blatantly order me otherwise, I didn’t intend that as a choice.”

  Danny gave him a grateful look.

  “They don’t make ’em much better than Anders,” Noll had said last year when assigning the seasoned non-com to cover Danny’s butt in his first-ever field command. “As you and your friends put it, he’s old school, and loyal as they come.”

  Damn if you weren’t spot-on, too, Noll.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” Anders said. “By the way, I don’t suppose the sergeant major bothered to fill you in on who’s picking us up, assuming we pull this off?”

  Danny bit his lip and glanced back to the others. “I’ve got my suspicions.”

  “What’s the holdup, Sergeant?” Kean called from his seat across the room. “Encountering problems making your escape, I presume?”

  Corporal Drayger stepped forward, the blade of his six-inch field knife glinting in his grasp.

  “Oh, I think not,” Kean said snidely. “The Zeller Treaty, remember?”

  “Sir, do we really need to leave this puke breathing?” Drayger moaned. “He’ll give away our position in a heartbeat.”

  “No doubt about it, Corporal,” Danny agreed. “Combine that with the fact that he’ll almost certainly land us a king’s ransom in a trade with Alystier, and that’s exactly why he’s coming with us.”

  Kean bellowed a laugh causing the flesh-roll beneath his shirt to jiggle. “Ah, so I’m valuable as a hostage now. How disappointing for you, Sergeant, that you would have to table your disdain for me in the name of honoring the bigger picture. If only your friends from the Kanaan could see you now. Alas,” he hissed with a click of his tongue while raising his zip-tied hands in a mock salute. “Such is the burden of leadership.”

  Danny cocked his head. “My dad always told me I’d be a shitty leader.” A bloodcurdling scream pierced the air when a round from his A-90 tore through the minister’s palm. “Maybe that prick was onto something after all.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter 2: Airborne

  “This sucks, Top. I hate this idea,” Reegan said as he bounded up the steps to the study. Behind him, Corporal Wiggins sat firmly zip-tied to his chair with a fresh mask of duct tape. “We’re totally not just gonna up and leave you guys here. And besides, we’ve got your big comeback at the Bombshell in two weeks.”

  Anders’s forehead made a v. “Comeback? Aren’t you supposed to be on leave with—”

  “Relax Reeg, your fight card will be fine,” Danny said, inspecting his confiscated uniform for bloodstains. “You guys just worry about making the LZ on time and getting back to the Keystone. Trust me, we’ve got this.”

  Drayger grunted from the back. “Damn Mims. You all think you’re invincible.”

  “I’m sorry, Corporal, were you saying something?” Danny snapped.

  “No, sir,” Drayger said, jerking upright.

  “No, sir?” Danny pressed, craning his neck to lean in tight. “You sure? ’Cause I could swear I just heard something that sounded an awful lot like insubordinate smartassery come pouring out of that bucktoothed mouth of yours. I don’t have time for insubordinate smartassery right now, Corporal. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir,” Drayger announced. “Understood and good, sir. Won’t happen again. Just tell me where you need me, sir.”

  “Glad to hear that,” Danny said, brow furrowed at the younger man who’d only just joined his unit two weeks ago. As the group’s CO, he didn’t have time for a debate, much less ignorant occupational stereotyping. “All right, everybody. Per our scouts outside, your best bet on getting out of here is to cut back to the southeast wing, dip down to the lower level, and bail out through the mess exit. Resistance should be fairly light there, given the hour and everything else that’s happening; so skirt the buildings, watch your feeds, and keep your formations steady and tight. Do that, and you’ll make it to Kang and his boys just fine. Ruah?”

  “Ruah,” the others said in unison.

  “What about him?” Reegan said, pointing to Kean. “He might opt to get stupid and make a scene once we’re out.”

  Danny shrugged. “Well, if that happens then he’s effectively blown any need you have to stay silent, in which case, you have my permission to put a hole in his other hand. Fair enough?”

  “Done,” Reegan said with zero hesitation.

  “All right, guys.” Danny glanced at his watch. “Clock’s at twenty mikes to dustoff. Time to split.”

  Once the group had gone, Danny leaned over the dead guard who’d so graciously donated his uniform and retrieved the man’s rifle, along with someone else’s helmet that, fortunately, wasn’t soaked in blood. Danny glared at the weapon. What a piece of junk. He hated the grays’ standard-issue assault rifles. They used a heavier-caliber round, which gave them more punch, plus their triple-stack magazines holding thirty percent more ammo were a nice bonus. But he�
�d always found them clumsy and awkward compared to the lightweight precision of the Auran A-90—the one he’d carried earlier in particular. It was the rifle he’d been issued five years ago on day one of his maiden tour with the Auran Star Corps’s Starborne Infantry Force—the one he’d shaken down, ripped apart, stripped clean, and reassembled more times than he could remember. Sadly, though, two tours, eighty-six drops, a staff sergeant’s stripe, and countless discharges later, the weapon would henceforth be the one he’d abandoned for the sake of a disguise.

  “Top, you ready to head out?” Anders asked. He, too, wore Alystierian-gray BDUs and was piling his gear into an enemy rucksack.

  Danny nodded then took a moment to remove his rifle’s firing pin as a sign of respect for the weapon’s service. A damn shame. “Yeah, let’s roll.”

  Negotiating the halls of the modestly populated CIC building, Danny and Anders held their composure on their way to the main stairwell, avoiding any undue eye contact that might draw attention to them. With all the activity in the area, most people were far more concerned with their own tasks than those of two ordinary guys in friendly garb—though Danny wondered just how long it would be until someone went to ask Comm Officer Wiggins why he’d suddenly gone mute. As they turned the next corner, the alarm sounded, and he had his answer.

  Pushing through the steel exit at the bottom of the stairwell, Danny and Anders emerged into a main yard on the southern side to find dozens of Alystierian soldiers rushing to their respective deployments. Fuel tankers and troop haulers skirted one another amid plumes of dust and sand on the base’s roadways. Behind it all stood the mine itself: a massive mound of stone between smoldering pillars of black smoke. Stalactite teeth hung above the gaping entrance that measured some thirty meters high by sixty meters wide. Heaven only knew how many kilometers deep the mine itself was.

  “That’s a big hole.” Anders whistled as scores of rig hands poured free of the opening to extinguish fires and save whatever they could of the rail line equipment outside. The actual mine, however, remained intact. “Any clue how we’re gonna close it for good?”

  Danny shook his head. “No idea, but maybe…” His ears caught a low glugging rumble, and Danny turned to spot a fuel tanker lumbering toward their position.

  “Sir?” Anders asked.

  “Xeek, if you had to guess, how much fuel would you say that thing is hauling?”

  Anders shrugged and eyed the gargantuan gray egg on treads. “I don’t know. Five, maybe six thousand gallons? And it looks to be the conventional stuff, too. Not the caldrasite blend they normally use.”

  “Gotta hate a resource crisis. Good thing our side doesn’t have that problem. Plus the old stuff tends to go boom when you light it, which works for us. Follow?”

  Anders pursed his lips. “I follow. But getting it is one thing; igniting it is another. If their tankers are anything like ours used to be, they’ll have all kinds of fail-safes to prevent that very thing. Hell, you could lob a grenade down the chute, and it still wouldn’t light.”

  “One thing at a time, bro. One thing at a time.”

  Waiting for a group of soldiers to jog past them, the pair headed left past a cluster of warehouses and waited for a modest break in the traffic before approaching the slow-moving vehicle.

  “Whoa, hold up!” Danny called, halting in front of the tanker and waving his arms. The machine ground to a stop with a loud, air-compressed shudder of treads.

  “You idiot, are you out of your slaring mind?” the driver protested. “My CO is gonna kill me if I don’t—”

  He stopped short when the passenger-side door swung open behind him. Turning to see why, the driver froze at the sight of Anders’s gun held low on the bench seat and pointed right at him.

  “Slide over,” Danny ordered.

  The man complied and was joined in the passenger cab by his two hijackers.

  “Okay, Xeek, what am I doing here?” Danny asked, staring at the array of knobs, shifters, and switches before him.

  “You guys are so dead,” the driver grumbled. “I don’t know who you are or what you—”

  His face smashing against the dashboard silenced him instantly.

  “You were saying, sir?” Anders released his fingers from the driver’s hair.

  “Yeah, how do I drive this thing?” Danny asked.

  “The panel-slide on your left controls your speed. Steer left and right with the hand grips in front of you.”

  “All right, here goes.” Danny flipped the bright green switch on the dash and the machine sputtered back to life. “Sweet. Now if I can—”

  “Freeze!” shouted a guard from the nearest warehouses.

  “And here we go.” Danny grabbed the accelerator slide and shoved it forward as the bullets began to fly.

  “Now what?” Anders shouted, heaving the unconscious driver out the door then slamming it shut and returning fire. “We got a plan for this?”

  “First things first: we get this rolling tub to the mine!” Danny fought with the accelerator. “Can we make it go any faster?”

  “Sorry, Top, but these things weren’t exactly built for that Sebring place you keep telling me about.” Anders recoiled when a blast of ricochets staccatoed near his head. “Just lean on it and go, but if it’s all the same to you, I’d really like to get off this thing before we send it headlong into a fiery doom.”

  “Copy that.” Danny tapped his earpiece. “Bandit, this is Hurricane. You make dustoff yet?”

  Reegan answered after a moment of static. “Roger that, Hurricane, just now. Rainmaker is breathing down our necks to bail off of this rock, so where are you guys?”

  “Just outside the CIC and heading south toward the mine in an Alystierian fuel tanker.”

  “A frickin’ fuel tanker?” A familiar gruff voice invaded the comm. “Subtle, Crockett. Real subtle!”

  “Good to hear you too, Jester,” Danny said, grinning at the sound of his longtime friend Link Baxter’s voice. “Your better half with you?”

  “Layla here, Hurricane,” Shannon Baxter said.

  “Somehow I figured when the time came for our favorite CO to send somebody down, you two would be the only ones crazy enough to accept.”

  “Tell me about it!” Link said. “I’d like to state for the record, though, that when we agreed to do this, it was with the understanding that I’d swoop in, scoop up you and your boys, then beat it back to my cushy spot in the Keystone’s drop bay. Nobody said jack about this little hornet’s nest! Where do you come up with this crap, anyway? The Death Wish movies?”

  “Sorry, bro, but it had to be done,” Danny said. “For what it’s worth, I would’ve used Lee’s little ‘blow the target from the inside out’ trick had the grays not cracked it after Dulaston.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” Link said. “Save your excuses for your old lady. I’d suggest, however, breaking them to her over a box of French chocolates and a good bottle of California red when you do, lest your balls end up in one of her beakers. Then again,” he said with a laugh, “that might be a foregone conclusion when she finds out about your Bombshell gig.”

  “Not a good time for this right now!” Danny buried his face in his arm as another wave of ricochets pelted the cab’s exterior.

  “Hey man, you know how pissed she gets when—”

  “Can you get to us or not, Jester?”

  “I need a minute, tool! Even with Layla on my wing, I still got creamed in twenty-three when I touched down for your crew. I had to circle clear back to forty-seven just to get free of it.”

  “Fine,” Danny snarled, looking up to see the cavernous entrance to the mine looming dead ahead. “How long?”

  “Five mikes, give or take.”

  “You’ve got three,” Danny said.

  “Ah, dumbass?” Link remarked. “Where, oh where, do you propose I pick you up? In case you haven’t noticed, you’ve got grays crawling up your crack from damn near every direction!”

  Anders checked his HUD
and slapped a fresh mag into his rifle. “He’s right, Top. We’ve got no less than a dozen enemy platoons heading right for us, plus another eight dug in on most of the inner zones.”

  Danny cursed under his breath and thought hard. They couldn’t do a 180 back to the north because of the CIC, which was now swarming with personnel. But heading east meant running into a wide-open sandbox with no support and nowhere to hide. That left west, which might’ve been a viable option were it not for the four-thousand-meter swan dive awaiting them beyond the cliffs.

  C’mon, there’s gotta be…Danny’s eyes went wide. “Xeek, did you pack your harness?”

  “What?” Anders asked over the butt of his gun.

  “Your drop harness, did you pack it when you swapped your gear into that rucksack?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Pull it out and strap in.” Danny spied a makeshift barricade of troops and vehicles forming at the mouth of the mine. “Once you’re done, I need you to grab mine out of my bag then pull your smoke and get ready.”

  Anders’s expression said that he clearly wasn’t following, but he did it anyway.

  “Jester, Layla. ETA?” Danny asked.

  “Sixty seconds out, Crockett,” Link said.

  “Good, because we’re bailing out of here in forty,” Danny said, “and when we do, we’re popping red smoke. Jester, that’s our cover to break loose for pickup; Layla, that’s your marker to fire. When you see it, wait fifteen seconds for us to clear the blast zone then unload on the entrance of that mine with both of your Devastators. That ought to be enough to blow the tanker and seal the mine.”

  “Easy, brother,” Link said. “How exactly do you plan on clearing a blast that size in fifteen seconds, on foot?”

  “We’re headed east, toward the canyon,” Danny said.

  “The canyon?” Link asked. “What do you honestly expect—”

  “E-36 back home,” Danny said. “Remember how we got out?”

  Link didn’t respond at first. “Whoa, you wanna go spearfishing? Are you frickin’ high?”

  “Thirty seconds, Top,” Anders said.