Yan's hand was hovering over the main control panel cover when he suddenly stopped trying to open it to place his charges. He waved Kieran over after taking a deep breath. Their hushed conversation was picked up by Nayla's improved hearing.
"Need your help here, Kieran."
"What's wrong?"
"Look under this panel." Kieran crouched next to Yan and looked into the small opening. From the panel cover, two wires—one blue and one red—snagged into the intricate circuitry inside. The word 'bomb' came to Kieran's mind in an instant. Taking a deep breath, he reached into his cybernetic forearm's tool compartment and took out two precision wire cutters. He wanted Yan to understand the risk, so he gave him a brief explanation of the situation.
"The trigger wire is one of these, and the other one is connected to the power supply. The trigger becomes inert if I cut the power wire first. We're all vaporized if I cut the trigger wire first. "Quick, what is your favorite color?"
"I'm a fighter, damn it, not an electrician!" Yan, perspiring, hissed back.
"Favorite color?" Kieran continued coolly.
Yan inhaled deeply while thinking quickly. "Blue." Silently, he thought, "They always cut the blue wire in the vids."
The red wire was cut by Kieran.
Nothing took place. Both of them let out a sharp sigh of relief. The remaining blue wire was then cut by Kieran. Yan cautiously removed the panel.
"Why'd you cut the red?" Yan, still unsteady, asked.
Kieran said, "Because you're a fighter, not an electrician," with a slight smile. The tension was broken by a wave of relieved laughter.
"What's so funny?" Perplexed, Nora asked from where she stood.
Between giggles, Yan said, "Our lives just depended on Kieran's twisted sense of humor."
"Jeez! The fact that we are still alive is a miracle. Dryly, Nayla made a joke.
"Oh, damn!" Yan's gasp brought on another round of muted laughter.
Yan calmed down and inserted his explosive charges into the console. Yan put the panel cover back on, making sure there was no obvious sign of their intrusion, and Kieran reconnected the trigger wires, making sure the booby trap appeared to be intact.
The fusion generator, which was on the lowest floor of the building, was their next target. They were still taken aback by the lack of personnel; the whole complex appeared to be run by a skeleton crew of about 200, and so far they had not met a single person. They couldn't quite put their finger on what was wrong. In order to achieve the greatest amount of destruction, more explosives were placed in the materials bay. Yan placed almost twenty pounds of plastic explosive at various crucial intersections with an almost childlike enthusiasm.
Nayla and Luna had to neutralize two guards in silence outside the fusion reactor control room. There was no sign that an alarm had been sounded or backup had been called because the takedowns were quick and tidy. With detonators armed, the explosives were rapidly placed around the reactor's main conduits, limiting their final target to the main hangar bay.
An elevated access gangway three stories above the main level gave them a clear view of the hangar when they first arrived. Nayla arrived at the doorway first, having scouted ahead. The group behind her was stopped by her single, sharp exclamation.
"Shit."
"What's wrong?" Yan muttered frantically.
"See for yourself." Nayla moved out of the way so the others could look through the door. They both responded in the same way. Three floors below, four enormous transport ships were being loaded by means of enormous conveyor systems with crates of pulse rifles just like the one that had been purchased on Tyran Station. Kyara was dwarfed by a factor of about fifty by each transport vessel, an apparently unarmed sphere driven by five massive thrusters mounted underneath; even with Kyara's turrets and missiles, it would be suicide to confront these giants in open space. The ships were joined by substantial support gantries and arranged vertically inside the central shaft.
"We cannot allow those ships to leave," Nora said somberly.
"No kidding!" Kieran uttered a silent cry. "But how in the hell do we stop those mammoths?!"
Nayla thought quickly, "If we can disable the top ship, then the others below it should be destroyed when it collapses."
The topmost transport's engines came roaring to life as if on cue. The gangways that connected started to pull back. Slowly and laboriously, the enormous sphere began to rise toward the surface.
"Get moving! "Now get out of here!" Nora shouted. The team was startled out of their stunned trance by the unexpected threat. As the hangar bay presumably filled with superheated exhaust, they slammed the heavy door behind them and scurried wildly back the way they had come.
First to recover, Nora gave a series of orders in quick succession. "Give your remaining explosives to Kieran, Yan! Grab one of those Colossus tanks and take Nayla! Get clear if another ship tries to launch, then give it your best shot! You're with me, Luna and Kieran!"
"Hot damn!" Yan shouted, already running down the hallway with Nayla right behind him.
Nora quickly guided Kieran and Luna down service ladders to the gantry stack's second ship level. She was looking for an access door that led straight onto a loading ramp that extended toward the ship's engine pods. Using a single high-explosive cartridge from his grenade launcher, Kieran blew open the reinforced door. They surprised a team of technicians overseeing the loading procedure by charging through the remaining smoke. Instinctively, a number of them drew sidearms and threw a frenzied barrage at the intruders. The three friends drew their own primary weapons and hid behind piles of crated pulse rifles.
Luna quickly used her M-16 to spray the area, killing four of the eighteen technicians in the area. Three more were struggling to reload when Nora, with deadly accuracy, took them out with her crossbow. After just thirty seconds of fighting, Kieran put an end to it with a well-placed shot from his 40mm grenade launcher. The remaining technicians were either instantly killed by the explosion or violently flung from the ramp to the hangar floor below, which was six stories below.
Stumbling over bodies and rubble, they hurried forward toward the engines of the transport. Kieran hurriedly placed ten pounds of plastic explosive in every engine pod that was within reach. In order to meet up with Nayla and Yan, they then turned and frantically ran back the way they had come, toward the personnel exit on the ground floor.
They squinted as their eyes adjusted, and a minute later they bounded out of the personnel door and back into the glaring sunlight. The Colossus tank that Yan had commandeered was parked fifty meters away. From the open hatch of the gunner's turret, he looked down at them with a mad smile. The ground shook violently beneath them, barely processing what had happened. As the second cargo ship rose, they hurried to the edge of the enormous launch pit. Yan vanished once more into the turret, preparing the tank's powerful arsenal. As they looked down, they saw that only two of the ship's five engine pods had been disabled by their sabotage; the other three were still blazing and the craft was still rising.
The turret of the Colossus swung smoothly behind them, bringing its four PACs into action. Nora, Luna, and Kieran clambered away from the edge of the pit. The second cargo ship's enormous bulk came out of the hole five seconds later. At the same time, Yan unleashed the entire arsenal of the tank. Around the tank, a noticeable pressure wave was produced by the discharge. Near-light speed, four incandescent beams of yellow energy lanced upward, slamming into the underside of the transport. Even after another engine blew up, the giant kept climbing. Yan fired again after giving the PACs four seconds to cycle. Molten metal poured into the surrounding area as this salvo tore a huge hole in the side of the ship. Another important engine was destroyed by his third volley. The ship in ascending slowed visibly. The final working engine finally sputtered and died. After stalling, the enormous transport started to fall back toward the earth.
While Nayla slammed the tank into reverse and sped quickly away from the pit, Nora, Kieran, and Luna ran for the safety of the adjacent forest line. The massive cargo ship struck the launch pit's bottom with devastating force ten seconds later. A half second later, a massive column of fire shot out of the hole, scattering wreckage over miles of jungle terrain and sending debris hundreds of meters into the air. The hangar was completely destroyed, as were the remaining fighters and transport ships. But the rest of the base remained intact.
Before carefully making their way back to their hidden camp, the five gave themselves permission to celebrate for a short while, shouting and cheering their accomplishment. Yan and Nayla drove the Colossus tank into the woods against Nora's express orders, parked it close to the camp's edge for protection, and then triumphantly jumped out. As they had anticipated, he avoided boasting, but instead walked around with an unbearable swagger for the rest of the day. To celebrate their hard-earned triumph, everyone ate double rations that night. Yan acknowledged that in order to increase the element of surprise, he had waited until their last departure before setting off the charges placed inside the facility's other systems.
That night, I slept in fits, interspersed with nervousness and expectation of departing. First to watch was Kieran, then Yan, and finally Nayla. Up until around 0300 hours, the rotation went smoothly. Faint, distant noises that the others would have missed were picked up by Nayla's incredibly sensitive hearing during her shift. After testing the air currents and listening carefully for a few seconds, she started frantically waking her companions. Although the others were immediately awakened by her frantic movements, she had to physically scratch at Kieran's neck to wake him from a deep sleep.
"What the fu—" With blood dripping between his metal fingers, Kieran began to clutch his bleeding neck.
"Soldiers," Nayla cut in abruptly. "They're on their way. Many of them. It sounds like every base survivor. Although they haven't yet left the main complex, that is going to change soon.
Nora made a quick calculation in her mind. That left about 182 heavily armed soldiers mobilizing against them, assuming that the only base casualties were the technicians on the loading ramp.
Oh no.