Chapter 78 Seventy eight
The belly of the Aegis-Class Destroyer was a ceiling of black steel that blocked out the sky, pressing down on us with the weight of a flying city.
As the Mag-Lev train rocketed beneath it, the air pressure changed, popping my ears. The wind howling around us took on a deeper, mechanical resonance. Directly above, the massive cargo-lift doors of the airship were open, glowing with the harsh, sterile white light of the Board's interior hangar.
"Incline approaching in four hundred yards!" I yelled over the comms, my eyes locked on the telemetry scrolling across my visor. "Dax, the internal defense grid is hot. If we jump into that hangar without blinding their sensors, their automated turrets will turn us into Swiss cheese before gravity even pulls us down."
"Then blind them, Ghost," Dax said, his voice terrifyingly calm for a man doing two hundred and fifty miles an hour on the roof of a bullet. "On my mark! Prep mag-locks for manual release!"
I pulled my data-deck from its holster, wrapping the thick connection cable around my left forearm. I didn't have a physical port to plug into. I had to broadcast a localized EMP-burst laced with my father’s override code, using the Sovereign’s Origin-Code engine to amplify the signal.
"Two hundred yards!" Reaper called out.
The track began to slope upward, a gentle incline designed to slow the train as it approached the Citadel terminus. But at our speed, that gentle incline was a launchpad.
"Hit the throttles!" Dax roared.
Twelve engines screamed, the Iron Wolves pushing their modified bikes to the absolute redline. The front wheels lifted slightly against the magnetic grip.
"Mark!" Dax shouted.
I stomped on the mag-lock release pedal.
CLACK.
The electromagnets disengaged. We hit the incline. Momentum and physics took over, ripping us from the roof of the train.
We didn't just jump; we were launched into the sky, twelve heavy motorcycles flying straight up into the open, illuminated underbelly of the Destroyer. The G-force pressed my spine against the back of the saddle, the world around me slowing down into a terrifying, weightless crawl.
I raised the data-deck, aiming it at the glowing white square of the hangar bay above us.
< EXECUTING: IFF_SPOOF_OVERRIDE.EXE >
I felt the Origin-Code in my blood surge, traveling down my arm and into the deck. A pulse of invisible, sapphire energy erupted from the Sovereign.
Inside the hangar, the blinding white security lights instantly flickered and turned a deep, friendly green. The automated ceiling turrets, which had just swiveled to track our ascending heat signatures, suddenly went slack, their targeting lasers winking out.
"Hack successful!" I screamed. "Defenses are down! Brace for impact!"
We cleared the threshold of the cargo doors, soaring into the cavernous hangar bay.
The Shock-Troopers waiting inside didn't stand a chance. There were forty of them, clad in the Board's elite, heavy grey armor, holding plasma rifles. They were facing the internal elevators, expecting an assault from the lower decks of the Citadel. They never expected a cavalry charge to drop on them from the sky.
Dax’s Interceptor hit the polished durasteel deck first. The heavy suspension bottomed out with a deafening CRANG, but he kept the rubber down. He didn't even wait for the bike to fully stabilize. He drew his SMG mid-bounce and opened fire.
The explosive rounds tore through the sterile air, catching the rear guard of the Shock-Troopers before they could even turn around.
The rest of the pack rained down around him. Tank’s massive trike slammed into the deck like a meteor, crushing a stack of munitions crates. Sienna and Reaper landed in a synchronized skid, their bikes whipping around to form a barricade.
I brought the Sovereign down hard, the iridescent blue engine whining as I slammed on the brakes, drifting perfectly into Dax’s six o'clock blind spot.
"Contact!" Dax roared, dropping the empty SMG and drawing his combat knife. "Close quarters! Don't let them form a firing line!"
The hangar erupted into pure chaos. The Shock-Troopers were elite, highly trained corporate soldiers, but their training was for organized, tactical warfare. They were fighting a textbook battle.
We were fighting a bar brawl at a hundred miles an hour.
A heavy trooper leveled his plasma rifle at Tank. Before he could pull the trigger, Dax vaulted off the seat of his Interceptor, crossing the distance in a blur of black leather. He drove his knee into the trooper's chest plate, knocking him off balance, and drove the combat knife into the unarmored joint beneath the armpit.
"Push them back to the bulkhead!" Reaper yelled, firing pinpoint bursts from his rifle, dropping two troopers who were trying to flank Sienna.
I didn't draw a weapon. I stayed on the Sovereign, my hands flying across the data-deck. I was tied into the room's local network now. I didn't need bullets when I controlled the environment.
A squad of ten troopers poured out of a reinforced blast door on the far side of the hangar, rushing to reinforce their dying comrades.
"Mia, right flank!" Dax warned, parrying a shock-baton with his forearm and snapping the attacker's wrist.
"I see them," I said, my fingers flying over the glass screen.
I accessed the hangar’s artificial gravity plating. I isolated the grid sector directly beneath the advancing reinforcement squad and inverted the polarity.
< OVERRIDE: GRAV_PLATING_SECTOR_4. >
The ten Shock-Troopers were suddenly yanked off their feet, falling up toward the thirty-foot ceiling. They slammed into the steel rafters with a sickening crunch, pinned there by three Gs of inverted force, their heavy weapons dropping uselessly to the floor below.
"Nice trick, Ghost!" Tank boomed, laughing as he fired a blue EMP ring from his heavy shotgun, frying the armor circuits of three troopers trying to take cover behind a fueling station.
Within ninety seconds, the hangar was quiet.
The polished deck was scorched and littered with groaning, incapacitated Board soldiers. The Iron Wolves stood in a loose circle around our bikes, chests heaving, adrenaline burning through our veins. We hadn't lost a single rider.
"Perimeter secure," Reaper reported, doing a quick brass-check on his rifle. "They're locking down the internal blast doors. We're trapped in the hangar."
"They think we're trapped," Dax corrected, wiping a streak of blood from his cheek not his own. He walked over to a heavy security terminal mounted on the wall. He didn't try to hack it. He just smashed the glass screen with the butt of his knife and ripped the wiring harness out.
"We didn't come here to steal their ship," Dax said, looking at me with that dangerous, Speedrun-King grin. "We came here to drop it on the Citadel."
Suddenly, the PA system crackled to life. A voice echoed through the massive, smoke-filled hangar a voice I recognized from the Black-Site interrogation logs.
"I don't know how a pack of wasteland scavengers managed to board my vessel," Commander Vance sneered over the intercom, his voice dripping with corporate arrogance. "But you've made a fatal error, Steele. I'm venting the hangar bay atmosphere in sixty seconds. You can choke on the vacuum."
"Vance," Dax said, picking up a discarded Shock-Trooper helmet and speaking directly into its comms unit. "You're reading from the wrong script."
Dax tossed the helmet aside and looked at me. "Mia. Tell me you can access the flight controls from here."
I plugged my deck directly into the sparking wires of the terminal Dax had just broken. I closed my eyes, letting the Origin-Code map the ship's massive architecture in my mind.
"I can't fly it from here," I said, my eyes snapping open. "But I can kill the anti-gravity engines."
"Do it," Dax said. "Let's see how well this fortress flies without power."