The featureless ferroconcrete sides of the warehouse tower up like a fortress towards a dark and cloudy sky. No stars, not on this night. All is blackness, except for the islands of brilliance cast by antique halogen lights on tall metal poles. Beyond those patches of light, all is blackness. For most species, terrifying blackness. For my kind, welcoming blackness.
I bare my teeth, behind the Omega Force helmet. Yes, other species should be terrified. Because I am moving through this blackness.
"Assault teams are in position." The voice of Bi'or, my Klingon exec, sounds in my ear.
"Detection?" I ask.
"Sensor spoofing is active. We will know how successful it is, when we start to move." Well, I should expect nothing else.
There are six security troopers between me and the nearest entrance. The nearest is a hundred and fifty metres away. If our sensor jamming is adequate, I should be able to cover that distance without being noticed. But operations - especially of this kind - never go to plan.
"Pass the word," I say. "Activate."
And I move, running over the concrete apron that surrounds the warehouse. There is no cover, except the night, so I must rely on speed. Little dots on my helmet's HUD confirm that the rest of my forces are in motion. If all goes well, this will be clean and fast -
"Halt!"
The amplified voice is accompanied by a green stab of disruptor light. So much for our sensor spoofing. I dive into a forward roll, and touch my wrist controls, engaging the Omega Force suit's distortion field. For a few precious seconds, I am invisible. I use those seconds, identifying the shooter, aiming my sniper rifle. When I shimmer back into visibility, I answer his fire with a single hypersonic tritanium slug. It is enough.
More disruptor fire is flashing around me, though. Tortured concrete snarls beneath my feet. They have not hit me, yet, and I do not think an individual bolt is enough to penetrate my heavy-duty personal shield. But I am not inclined to take the chance. I jink and swerve as I run, trying to throw off their aim, and I fire the sniper rifle. It is suppressing fire, meant only to harass them and make them duck for cover - but I am gratified to see one more of the guards fall, clutching at a shoulder wound. Incapacitated, but he will probably survive for questioning. Gratifying, indeed.
Blue-green plasma bolts sear through the night behind me, and the remaining guards turn to confront this new threat. One of the assault teams is coming up to support me. I turn on the distortion field again, move fast, pick off another two guards as the field fades out. Plasma fire from the assault team brings down the remaining pair. I reach the wall of the warehouse, and operate my transporter buffer - swapping the sniper rifle for a compact Omega carbine, and bringing out a spatial charge, which I affix to the secured door.
A shiver runs through the concrete beneath me, and I hear Bi'or snarl over the comms, "Shuttle launch. Confirm trilithium signature -"
I switch channels. "Flight Feoh. Shuttle launching. Intercept and terminate."
I can see the shuttle myself, as I move. A demilitarized KDF Toron-class, I think. It rises steeply into the sky -
Flight Feoh decloaks and opens fire at point-blank range, plasma bolts illuminating the undersides of the clouds with blue-green lightning. Two of the shuttle's stubby winglets are torn away, flames blossom along its fuselage. It draws a fiery spiral across the air as it loses height and crashes to the ground. The Scorpion fighters howl overhead and fade back into the night.
I scowl. Too easy. I hit the remote detonator on the spatial charge. The security door vomits flame and fragments into the night. Before the pieces have stopped jangling, I have engaged my distortion field and am running, invisible, through the doorway.
Inside, there are armed men, disruptor rifles pointed expectantly at the doorway. I rush past them, turn, and spray them with fire as I become visible again. The interior of the warehouse is one vast open space, almost empty. Our intelligence was correct - they were dismantling the facility, they were ready to move. A few knots of people cluster around the remaining equipment, taking what cover they can. Dull crumps of explosions indicate more breaching charges from more of my assault teams.
And in the middle of the empty floor, a ramp, leading down... to a basement area, and a tunnel, a tunnel through the concrete and out to safety.
The cargo hauler is a standard tractor-trailer rig, almost too big to fit in the tunnel, so its driver is approaching slowly and carefully. I switch the autocarbine from heavy stun to destructive force. The tractor has three pairs of wheels, each with run-flat tyres that must be a metre and a half in diameter. I spray them with fire, long, sustained bursts, ripping away the synthetic rubber and scattering burning fragments across the area.
The tractor slews. I keep up the fire, though the carbine is growing hot in my hands, and an occasional disruptor beam sizzles against my shields. The wheels are burned down to the bare metal, and the tractor lurches to one side and crashes into the concrete pillar at the tunnel entrance. The long trailer jack-knifes behind it, totters on the brink of overturning, then slams back down. I breathe a quiet sigh of relief.
The assault teams have broken through. All remaining resistance is being quickly eliminated. I race down the ramp, blast the door at the back of the trailer, pull it open and level my carbine.
Inside are a few bewildered and severely shaken technicians - human or humanoid, these people seem to be mostly human - and a long, elegant, deadly shape. I aim my carbine at the technicians. Fortunately the Low charge and Thermal overload warnings are only visible on my HUD.
Footsteps behind me - my HUD shows them as friendlies. Bi'or charges down the ramp to meet me. "The shuttle," she says, clearly out of breath, "the shuttle was a decoy -"
"I know," I say. "But this is not." I indicate the missile with a jerk of my head. "Scan for trilithium, but you know you will find it. This is a textbook example... if your textbook was written by Dr. Tolian Soran."
The technicians are stumbling out of the trailer, hands raised in token of surrender. I lower my weapon. One of them, perhaps bolder than the rest, turns to speak to me. "Omega Force?" she says. "Kralon II is a neutral world... Starfleet and the KDF have no jurisdiction...."
"How very true." I pull off the helmet and bare my fangs at her. "And how magnificently irrelevant." My telepathy is modest at best, but it is enough to taste her fear. "Do you wish to know where you stand under Reman law? I warn you, it is governed by three main principles - survival, expedience, and revenge."
She quails. "We've - we've done you no harm -"
"Sometimes, we anticipate. And we are concerned, over devices such as this. We Remans love the dark, true, but we do not fear the light so much that we desire to extinguish the suns. Why did you build this weapon? Who were you taking it to?" I lean closer, to gaze into her eyes. "We will have answers. All in due time.... Take them away."
There is much to be done. The techs, the surviving guards, any actual leaders will have to be closely questioned... and, for all my bravado, such questioning will at least have to be compliant with Imperial law. And we have the material evidence to sift and catalogue... not to mention intercepting the smugglers who were expecting to take delivery of this monstrosity.
I grin without mirth at the thought of those criminals, expecting to receive a super-weapon, finding themselves looking down the barrels of the Saraswati's plasma arrays instead.
"Sir." Another voice, behind me: I turn. Subcommander N'aina from the engineering team is there, holding a datapad... and her expression is unusually troubled.
"What is it?" I ask.
"We've found some documentation already... including the name. The name of the project." She swallows.
"All projects have names. What is so disturbing about this one?"
She shakes her head. "The name - I recognize the derivation, it's from some Earth root language, it just means 'sun-killer'. But the number...." She holds out the datapad.
"The number?" I am baffled. But not for long, because I can read the title on the pad, and the number - yes, that is cause for concern.
The name of this project, it seems, was Solarcide 2.
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