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Back on Hail’s ship, the crew in the mission center was online and seated at their control stations.
Each creator of the Jefferson Starship had four flat screens at the control station. The Huey had dropped the contraption on the landing zone, and prior to landing, the cameras had begun streaming video. The device had four cameras, one located on each side. The cameras peeked out of the four ports positioned directly over its matching gun port. Each camera delivered a clear view of the surrounding area, and since there were four cameras, it gave the crew on the Hail Nucleus a 360-degree panoramic view. It was still dark outside so the cameras were in infrared mode; therefore, the only color displayed on the crew’s monitors was green.
On this mission, Dallas, the acting leader, was sitting in the middle of the room in the captain’s chair Hail usually occupied. Mercier and Abba Zorn acted as the mission analysts. They were seated one tier down from Dallas. On the final tier sat the mission pilots. There were sixteen pilot stations in total, but the Starship didn’t require that many people to operate it. In tight quarters with a lot of friendlies, too many cooks could spoil the soup. Hail’s crew could not afford to make any mistakes that might put the lives of Kara, Hail, and his men or the children in peril. This operation was being run from a big cargo vessel using a small capsule, and directed by a handful of mission-critical personnel.
The radio communications from the Huey were piped into the mission center via the overhead speakers. One second everything was going to plan. A second later pandemonium was heard aboard the chopper.
“I saw a rocket come from the home’s window located approximately fifty yards to the north,” Jason Wilson reported.
The mission center crew heard Hail report, “We’ve been hit! We’ve been hit!”
The crew heard Hail shout with alarm, “Gage!” Without context, they had no idea what had happened to Gage Renner. Next, they heard the engines rev. For some reason, the turbofan was racing, and a beat later it appeared to be bogged down. In the background, the crew could hear the helicopter violently breaking apart. The small speakers in the mission center popped and crackled when the main rotor tore into the ground.
“Open the gun ports,” Dallas ordered.
Four small doors directly under the Starship’s cameras popped open and four miniguns extended though the openings.
“Anyone with a trajectory on that house, get some suppressed fire on it,” he barked.
The two operators, Sarah Starling and Jason Wilson, could clearly see the home in the targeting camera. The other two miniguns were on the opposite side of the capsule and had no chance of a shot. Sarah and Jason focused their crosshairs on the window and pulled their joystick triggers. A combination of tracer rounds and bullets ripped through the home. Some shots chewed up cinderblock on the outside wall, while other rounds disappeared though the opening. After a few short bursts, they waited for a response. They followed up with a few more volleys and waited again.
*-*-*
Gage Renner had been taking in the line, wrapping it from hand to elbow and then around his arm at the precise moment the Huey was hit by the RPG. Without warning, the chopper tilted 30° on Gage’s side of the aircraft. On his knees, with one arm wrapped in rope and with his free hand nowhere near a panic bar, Gage had fallen out of the chopper. The good news was the rope around his arm was still connected to the helicopter. Because it was wound around his arm, it slowed his descent. Loop by loop, the line slowly unwrapped from his arm as he dangled from the doomed aircraft. Helpless, Gage watched in abject horror as the helicopter spiraled downward. The ground quickly approaching, he knew he was going to die either by the weight of the helicopter landing on him or by having one of the blades bisecting him. If given the choice, he would select death by blade. It would be faster and less painful, at least he hoped so.
In that brief millisecond, he had the strangest thought: his mind flashed to the use of guillotines during the French Revolution. Believing he was facing a similar method of death, he wondered if the condemned had time to think, “Hey, my head was just chopped off.” After all, the act was almost instantaneous. One minute your head was attached; a second later it was in a basket. For a few seconds the brain’s blood circulation was present. Gage determined those killed by a guillotine would have a few seconds to contemplate life. If the brain stayed active after being disconnected for a few seconds, it would have longer to live than if the body was cut in half. After all, if the heart was still pumping, the brain would keep ticking.
The rope that was wrapped around hand and elbow began to sluff off, loop by loop, yanking on Gage’s shoulder with every significant drop. As the helicopter continued its descent, each discarded loop of rope pulled significantly tighter on the remaining loops. When he finally ran out of rope, Renner fell only ten feet to the ground. He landed awkwardly on his right foot and felt his ankle twist violently. Renner screamed in agonizing pain as the Huey passed directly over him.
To Gage’s surprise and amazement, the chopper didn’t land on him. He turned his head in time to watch as the helicopter’s blade ravaged the ground and sailed through the next-door neighbor’s window. The other blade soared over his head into the countryside. Time to assess injuries. His ankle hurt but his shoulder was killing him. He expected that the strain from the rope had popped his shoulder out of its socket, dislocating it. He didn’t know which hurt more, his arm or his leg, but he couldn’t be too bummed. He knew he had been extremely lucky to have survived. After all, who can fall from a helicopter at fifty feet and live to brag about it? As Gage was counting his blessings, gunfire erupted. He didn’t know who was shooting, but he fully appreciated his vulnerability lying exposed in the front yard.
On his left, someone appeared from out of the darkness, grabbed his bad arm and began dragging him toward the nearby house.
“Stop,” Gage cried out. He looked up to see Marshall standing above him.
“Can you move?” Hail asked him.
“Slowly. My shoulder is wasted and I twisted my ankle.”
Urgently, Hail told him, “We have to get inside before we all get shot.”
Hail reached down and grasped Renner’s good arm. He helped Renner stand on his good leg, then swiftly bent down and wrapped Renner’s good arm over his neck. Adrenaline was a good motivator, and Hail reached the front door with his friend still intact. Fortunately, the home was close, because Gage, especially with his injuries, was heavier than he expected. Nolan, in the meantime, had pulled Paige from the chopper, and they had almost made their way to the home’s front door as well.
As the chopper’s crew arrived at the home, the door miraculously opened. Behind them, a barrage of gunfire erupted. Hundreds of rounds could be heard pinging off the Huey. The four passengers that escaped the fall from the Huey darted into the safety of the home.
The door slammed shut and locked behind them.
Kara turned toward her rescuers and said, “Welcome to my humble abode. So far, Marshall, your rescue plan kind of sucks. Is anyone hurt?”
Outside, the gunfire subsided. The sun’s morning shadows turned unknown shapes into finite objects. With the new dawn, Kara knew it was a matter of minutes before the show would start in earnest.
*-*-*
Zain saw flashes of light originating from the capsule in the yard followed by accurate bullets that peppered the wall he was hiding behind. It finally occurred to him that the capsule was a weapon, the likes of which he had never seen. A pair of guns on the contraption had laid down suppressed fire. The sun’s very first rays allowed him to see the silhouettes of the chopper’s occupants making it to safety inside the other home.
The terrorist loaded another projectile into the RPG and centered the crosshairs on the capsule. Zain pulled the trigger and the rocket exited the tube, billowing fire out the back end. The rocket found its mark and exploded, but it didn’t appear to have left the smallest of dents on the capsule. In response to the attack, the miniguns on the capsule opened fire again, forcing Zain to retreat to the relative safety of the floor.
Shaken, the terrorist allowed himself a full minute before glancing out the window.
Everything outside had become still. Then the strangest thing happened. Two metal doors on the capsule opened, and from the doors, small ramps were lowered to the ground. With improved lighting outside, Zain saw two tank-like objects roll out of the capsule down the ramps. They were small. No taller than a child’s tricycle, but instead of wheels the tanks rode on thick tracks. On top of the tracks sat a wedge-shaped body. The tiny tanks began to roll in his direction.
Zain popped up and sent three short bursts of lead toward the tiny tanks. A few of the bullets hit the bodies of the wedge-shaped vehicles, but the rounds simply skidded off the surface. The terrorist expected the mini-tanks to open fire, but they didn’t. Instead, they just continued to roll forward. It was eerie, as if the machines, possessing minds and knowing they couldn’t be harmed by gunfire, moved confidently and directly into heavy fire, without cause for alarm.
Zain and Kornev watched the toy tanks approach them.
“We need to get out of here,” Kornev told Shallah.
“Hell if we do,” Zain responded.
Kornev knew danger when he saw it. He had previously been on the wrong end of Hail’s drones, and he wasn’t going to wait around to find out what superpowers these new weapons possessed. With a rifle in his hands, Kornev ran to a back bedroom and exited through a window and out of the line of fire, his one aim being to increase the distance between himself and Hail’s robots.
Zain keyed on his radio, spoke into his headset, and instructed, “Commence the attack.”
*-*-*
Sarah Starling and Jason Wilson had switched from the Starship’s fixed guns and now controlled two tanks that were quickly closing in on the house. On the backside of the Starship, Oliver and Knox also opened the doors, lowered the ship’s ramps, and moved their tanks in the opposite direction. As the tanks rolled forward, Oliver and Knox watched their screens for potential targets. Hail had informed the mission crew there were hundreds of combatants in theater. So far, they hadn’t observed any.
“Keep your eyes peeled,” Dallas told his drone operators. “They’ve got to be there. We just can’t see them.”
Then, as if on cue, bullets began to rain in, seemingly from every direction.
*-*-*
Inside, Hail and his crew followed Kara into the hallway.
“I have reinforced this area. The home has thick walls, most of it, probably with cinder block filled with cement, and the interior walls are made from the same material. So unless they use some heavy ordnance, we should be safe here.”
Hail set Renner down on the floor. “What’s to keep them from shelling the house?” Hail asked.
Kara answered, “They don’t want to hurt the kids. That’s one of the reasons I took them. It must be driving Zain crazy knowing they’re in here, but he can only go so far to get his kids out. Apparently, Kornev told him which bedroom they’re in because the gunfire is directed in a manner so it won’t hit the back bedroom.”
“And what’s to keep them from coming in through the bedroom window?” Hail asked.
Kara picked up a line of paracord from the floor and gave it a tug. Somewhere in another part of the home, a machine gun spat bullets.
“I have a gun pointing out a nearby window,” Kara smiled, holding the line up in front of the group. “I have a gun in every window,” she added, holding up the other lines. “They won’t try the children’s bedroom, because they don’t know if a gun is behind that one as well.”
“Very cool,” Nolan said.
Suddenly, it sounded like a fire was ravaging a munitions factory outside. Guns fired from every direction. Simultaneously, Paige, Kara, Nolan, and Hail dropped to the floor next to Gage.
“I guess we’ll soon see what the Starship can do,” Hail said. He held up his hands and smiled warily. He crossed his fingers on both hands.
“What’s the Starship?” Kara asked.
Renner interjected, “Hey, sorry to interrupt show and tell, but someone needs to pop my shoulder back into its socket. Now.”
*-*-*
As Kara had deduced, with no opposing gunfire, the militants left their foxholes and advanced on the home.
Sarah Starling reported, “I’ve got movement.” She set the crosshairs of her gun on a man stepping out from behind a tree. She flipped her gun to manual and fired a single shot. The round caught the man in the Adam’s apple. Initially, he barely acknowledged the shot, but within five seconds, he stopped advancing and pawed at his throat. He dropped his rifle on the ground and clawed at his neck using both hands. Sarah watched the man in awe. This was the first incidence the new acid round had been fired in a real combat scenario, and observation seemed warranted. The man ran back in the direction he came from, neglecting to pick up his rifle.
“Looks like the new acid rounds work,” Starling deadpanned to the crewmembers within the mission room.
From Jason’s mini-tank, he observed two men beginning to close ranks on the house. He fired at the first man, striking him in the hand. He pivoted the gun slightly to the left, and focused a red laser on the other man’s right arm. Set in single firing mode, Jason pressed the trigger once. It was strange watching the delayed reactions occur, but Jason supposed it was even stranger for the men who’d been hit. They didn’t have a clue what was happening to them, but one thing was certain, both men felt extreme agony. The man hit in the hand inspected it for a gunshot wound. There was no evidence of a bullet, but an angry red mark was followed by a blotch that started to smoke. The clear acid would burn through the layers of skin: epidermal, dermal, and through the hypodermal. Jason hypothesized the acid could penetrate all the way to the bone.
Just minutes after being hit by the acid rounds, the men fled from sight.
Now entire squads emerged from the safety of the trees. As the men advanced on all four corners of the safe house, from their monitors in the mission room Sarah and Jason solemnly took out any man within range but they soon became overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the army.
“Looks like it’s going to be an all-out jailbreak down there,” Sarah reported.
Dallas reached down and pressed an icon on his screen labeled EJECT POLES.
Near the top of Starship’s capsule, four barbed poles were blown both upward and outward. They sailed through the air like javelins. As round as a beer can and the length of a walking stick, the poles landed vertically, piercing the hard soil with their barbed tips.
Dallas put his finger over an icon labeled BLOW R1 and waited. The poles had an effective range of about twenty yards. For the poles to be successful, the army of men would need to get closer. Fortunately, the men, oblivious to the danger ahead, continued to advance. Meanwhile, the tanks continued to fire, and each round removed a man from the mix. Propelled by air pressure, when the mini-tanks fired the acid bullets, they only made a tiny hiss. Many soldiers had no idea where the stinging bits had come from.
Within thirty yards of the home, the crew observed the onslaught of two platoons, roughly 80 men. As Knox fired, he called out to Dallas, “What are you waiting for?”
Dallas responded, “I want them to pass the poles. When the rings blow, it’s going to be nasty. I could do without seeing the eyes melt out of their heads. Plus, we want them to be able to see well enough to retreat.”
Oliver Fox was having a pretty good time. This was almost like playing level 1 of a video game. Shooting these guys was amazingly easy. All he had to do was roll the tank forward until he was within range of a target. It was as simple as focusing the red dot on the body part he wanted to hit and pulling the trigger. This method of fighting didn’t take a great amount of skill. His grandmother could probably do it.
“A little farther,” Dallas said to himself. Most of the men had crossed over the imaginary line created by the location of all four poles.
“Any time now,” Sarah told Dallas.
Dallas pressed the red icon labeled BLOW R1. Instantly, ring number one on each pole exploded and sprayed the surrounding vicinity with tiny acid balls. The orientation of the pole determined which body part would be hit. The detonation of the rings caused every man to be struck by the acid bullets. Backs, necks, arms, and legs were being ravaged by the mindless acidic vermin. But unlike those hit by the tanks, these men had been sprayed by multiple acid bullets. Where they had been hit didn’t seem to be a factor. The reactions were unanimous. All the men gave up the attack. A few dropped to the ground and writhed around as if they were on fire. Others twirled in panicked circles, clutching at different parts of their bodies. Still others ripped at their clothing, trying to get at whatever was eating away at their skin. In very short order, the first group of attackers abandoned the battlefield—some ran, others screamed, and yet others did the strange dance moves of men bitten by several venomous snakes.
“Yes!” Dallas exclaimed in triumph as he watched a few stragglers hightail it to the backlines.
Sarah and Jason released their joysticks and bumped fists. Alex and Oliver still grasped the sticks that maneuvered the tanks. It was now time to enter and clear the other home.
*-*-*
Inside the safe house, Hail’s phone rang. He answered it and recognized Dallas Stone’s voice.
“Hi, Marshall. Are you guys OK in there?”
“Nolan had to relocate Gage’s shoulder. Gage also sustained a sprained ankle from his fall from the Huey. But other than that, we are in good shape.”
Dallas said, “I bet Gage cried like a baby when his shoulder was popped back into its socket.”
“You’re right about that,” Hail agreed. “How are things outside?”
“Pretty good. We took out the first wave of men, probably about 80 or so. The acid pellets worked really good.”
“Well,” Marshall corrected his protégé.”
“Well, what?” Dallas asked.
“They worked well, not good,” Hail told him.
“Really, right now? You want to go there?”
Hail said, “I always say good and proper English begins on the battlefield.”
Dallas laughed. “Yeah, right.”
Hail said, “So tell me about the new acid rounds. How did they work?”
Dallas said excitedly, “Man, they didn’t have a clue what hit them, but they sure as hell didn’t want to stay to find out.”
“What’s going on at the house next door?” Hail asked, knowing that the terrorist Kara was after was probably hunkered down inside.
“Oliver and Alex are preparing to breach the house. If we find Kara’s guy, what do you want us to do with him? Do you want him dead, alive, or smoking?”
Hail guessed he already knew the answer, but he turned to ask Kara nonetheless. “Do you want Zain Shallah dead or alive?”
“Alive,” Kara said, feeling no need to elaborate.
“Alive,” Hail repeated into the phone.
“Roger that. I’ll call you back after we breach the house,” Dallas said, and he clicked off the call.
*-*-*
Watching from the window, Zain saw the poles launched from the upper part of the capsule. He was surprised how far they flew, maybe twenty meters before landing straight up on their ends, sticking out of the ground. He had no idea what the poles did or why they had been launched, but he didn’t have time to focus on the sticks right now.
With great satisfaction, he saw his men closing in on the house where his boy was being held. This was it. A fraction of his men, about a fourth, should easily be enough to take occupation of the home. As his men closed within fifteen meters of their objective, the dark poles spat out a spray of something in a fine mist. It looked like a blizzard of some unknown debris puffed out like a swarm of bees, and his men began to swat at themselves exactly like they were under attack from an angry hive. For a crazy moment, Zain thought maybe it was bees. His men’s reactions looked like an attack of killer bees. Zain watched in stunned silence as his men went crazy, trying to swat away the insects as if their stings were toxic. What the terrorist saw sent a cold chill all the way down to his core. Uniformly, most of his men dropped their weapons and ran from the battlefield. Those who remained rolled frantically around on the ground.
In all the battles Zain had participated, he had never seen anything like this. He had seen men shot, blown up with hand grenades, and injured by bombs; but those reactions were nothing compared to the manic reactions of the men attacked by this unknown weapon.
Zain radioed his remaining men, “Move in. I want everyone to advance and take the home. But, be careful. And do not hurt my son.”
Zain had barely finished barking his orders when the boards that had been nailed up to cover where the front door had once been exploded.
*-*-*
Outside Shallah’s defenses, Alex had driven his mini-tank up to the home’s front door but found a thick plywood board sealing the entrance. He drove the tank up as close as he could get and began flipping through the menu screens until he found the one labeled BREACH. He had two options: SET CHARGE and FIRE CHARGE. The FIRE CHARGE option was grayed out until the activation of the SET CHARGE option.
With the front of his tank facing the door, Alex pressed the SET CHARGE icon. At the base where the tracks attached to the tank’s body, a small hatch door opened. A blob of clay shot from the opening and stuck to the door. A tiny umbilical wire unfurled and connected the tank to the plastic explosive now attached to the door. Alex moved his finger to the FIRE CHARGE icon. First, he announced, “Fire in the hole,” and then he touched the icon.
He had expected the plywood board to come apart, so he was surprised when it vaporized. There one second and gone the next. “That was so cool,” he said to himself, pressing his joysticks forward and entering the home.