part0039

As she left the council chamber, Ming felt the MoSCOW suit tighten around her muscles in anticipation of coming action. Her senses sang as Echo came online in her head and released a rush of adrenaline into her body.

A schematic of the station appeared in her visual, a blinking red dot in the lower third of the Olympus. The child was on the medical deck. Echo tapped Ming’s retinal implant into the space station security system and she was immediately overwhelmed by an onrush of alarms.

Ming lost a step at the sight that filled her display. Space troopers in full battle armor executed a flawless drop formation from a shuttle, racing toward the station in a linked line right under the point-defense systems. Clouds of vapor surrounded them as the formation broke apart and executed a decel maneuver. They slid under the field of view of the external cameras. Moments later the vid feed went blank.

She could hear Ito’s voice in her head. If your enemy is much larger, then use your speed to get inside his reach. Blind your enemy, then pick them apart, piece by piece from the inside .

As if following her thoughts, the deck shifted under her feet. Her ears popped, indicating a sudden loss of pressure, then restabilized.

Ming bypassed the elevator, heading for the maintenance shaft that ran along the outer skin of the station. She ripped off the locked access door and dove through the opening. She rebounded off the far wall, then threw herself down and across the open space to the opposite wall, leapfrogging her way down the wide-open shaft. She caught a steel girder, let the suit take the bulk of the strain off her shoulders, then pushed off again.

Down she flew like a trapeze artist, leaping, grasping, then leaping again. When she got to the medical deck, she locked her grip on a beam above the access door and kicked it open with both feet. Ming rolled into a gleaming white hallway.

A few meters away, a man dressed in an Olympus security uniform slumped against the wall. Even from this distance, Ming could tell he was dead. The door of the exam room next to him hung open. Inside, Ming processed the obvious signs of a fight—a smear of blood on the floor, a smashed hypo gun, an overturned chair—but her attention was drawn to a neonatal incubator unit.

Echo alerted her to sounds in the hallway. She heard the distinctive creak of body armor, the sound of deliberate footsteps. Ming flattened against the wall just as the muzzle of a handgun appeared in the doorway. She gripped the barrel, forcing it away from her and drawing the guard inside. The guard tried a head-butt, forcing Ming to throw her own head back.

The wall next to her face exploded into shards of plastic as the guard’s partner fired through the wall. She threw herself backwards, securing the first guard in the crook of her elbow. She pressed the muzzle of his weapon against his eyeball.

She could hear the near-panicked rasp of the second guard’s breath. The second man was actually a woman. She appeared in the doorway, handgun gripped in both hands, aimed at Ming’s head.

When the eyes of the female guard defocused to make the call, Ming acted. Three shots, dead center of her body armor, slammed the woman back against the far wall. She got off one shot as she went down, shattering the light above Ming’s head.

The guard in her grasp struggled, but the weapon was already back poking him in the eye.

“She was wasting time,” Ming said in his ear. “I’m going to let you go so you can take care of her. She’s not dead, just knocked out. Her body armor saved her.”

As he attended to his partner, Ming accessed the hallway camera outside the room and fast-watched it at high speed.

Graves and Santos entered the room with the child and a security man took station outside. A doctor in a white coat approached, chatted up the security guard, then put him down with a single punch to the throat. The general, Santos, and the baby exited the room, locked it, and hurried away. Minutes later, the doctor sans white coat and sporting a nasty head wound exited.

Ming paused the recording to run a face-rec on the doctor and came up empty. On a station with a controlled population like Olympus, that could only mean one thing: the man worked for one of the council in a personal capacity. The visitor was a hit man, not a doctor, and he was still operational.

In the background, Echo searched for any sign of the fleeing survivors using whatever data feeds she could scavenge. She found them in the stairwell, headed down. Graves was taking them toward the fighting.