[68791] AiNew Madrid“From here on out, code names only, ye?” Gray Top said with a nod toward Ai. “Even in the SCIF.”Ai wiped grease onto her biosuit coveralls, adjusted the thick plate of ballistic armor over her chest that was disguised to look like a simple radiation shield for an extended EVA, looked at the thick exoskeleton supports that ran along her arms and legs, and nodded as she stood up to follow Gray Top.“Aye aye, Top.”Ai, Gray Top, and the others of their unit had been on a Wharton and Wake station on orbit above New Madrid in the Olentsi system for three weeks. Three weeks of playing the part of honest subcontractors inspecting various safety systems and performing long-needed maintenance tasks, but they were here to surveil, compromise, and eventually stop the last of the Grayson Services Group operations in the system.Wharton and Wake had only informal ties to Grayson. Here they were just one among several tenants in the Wharton and Wake station. Despite overlapping rihanarchist interests between the two organizations, Wharton and Wake had always maintained plausible deniability when it came to involvement with Grayson’s various crimes. Crimes that had now occurred all over the Spanning Worlds and United Planets.Ai followed Gray Top to the SCIF, tucked away in a barely functional section of a damaged quadrant of a ring hab on the station. Through autonomous monitoring dead zones, in a nearly frigid and unshielded region of ring, and behind a damaged bulkhead, they reached their portable SCIF tent. Secure compartmentalization of information. It was a digital and sensor black hole.“We’re running late,” Gray Top said as he ducked through the hole behind the square bulkhead sheet. “Double time, Betty Blue.”Ai stumbled through a few meters of cramped and pitch-black piping—piping that was dripping, moaning, and hissing—as they reached the entrance to the SCIF. It was, essentially, an oversized emergency hab tent made from a thick, soundproof wall, which was covered in a crisscross metallic weave. She ducked into the SCIF tent after Gray Top.Ai had never seen their makeshift SCIF so full. Specced to fit only the four Activity operatives—Gray Top, Red Cap, Green Dragon, and herself—it was a tight fit with the five additional operators from the ninth Special Operations Wing Ghost Operations and Reconnaissance Group. The sight of those strange blacker-than-black rainbow diffractive armor suits that gave the GORG their moniker sent shivers down her spine. Both the armor and the operators were called Shades, and in their armor, they really looked like living shadows. They were ghosts.This was only Ai’s third time working with Shades, but all her experience with them had been in the last Solar year. She was burning it at both ends, trying to keep up with the tempo the Shades set. Not that she was some civie or scut-pup. No, she was one of the field agents of the United Planet Navy’s intelligence services, known as The Activity. An elite cadre of intelligence operatives and analysts with high enough clearance to know the Shades even existed. She knew it was her job to fight side-by-side with Shades whenever a pipe needed to get hit, or a boot had to gecko grip on some cold planetoid, but Commander Anya Luciana Chen had gone on a crusade against Grayson over the last year, and Ai was wearing thin.The results spoke for themselves, though, and Ai was at least proud of her contribution to the Shades’ work. They had found three highly illegal—not to mention wildly immoral—operations centers of Grayson Services Group. They had destroyed and dismantled two of them. Only one remained. Ai shook her head to focus her thoughts on the ongoing briefing.“…at that point Commander Chen and UNSV Enenra will gidizip in, clean up any remaining Grayson resistance, and give us a proper evac along with all three of our mission critical VIPs—or however many we secure.”“Will we have the backing of the Cooperative Defense this time?” Red Cap asked.“Given recent events, the Commander has kept this need-to-know,” the Shade explained.Ai knew that meant it was a “no.” If any of them got caught by the Spanning Worlds Cooperative Defense, they’d be on their own. If Cooperative Defense caught them, they would treat them essentially like pirates or rogue contractors, just as they were treating Grayson now.“We’re focused on three VIPs. Jakande, Peter. Ali, Peyton. Silva, Vis-viva. Obviously, the ideal world is we get all their hostages, but with any of these three critical VIPs we’ll be able to make a strong case against Grayson back in Sol. To be clear, then, we achieve minimum viability if we secure any of those three,” the Shade stared out at the crowd from beneath a bronze polarized visor. “Oke. Questions before we get down to nanoscale? Comments? Now’s the time to air them.” ***Ai and her three colleagues strapped themselves into the rocketcan and burned across the void that separated the working dock rings for general use and those contracted to Grayson Services Group. Ai was cycling through her breathing exercises to calm herself. The team wasn’t going hot as soon as they docked—they were there to play a part—but her body was reacting like she was about to hit a combat zone. If she was going to act like a clueless subcontractor there to fix another subcontractor’s fuck-up, arranged by The Activity’s embedded assets, she needed to be calm.“Remember,” Gray Top said with a grunt from the hard acceleration. “Once shit flies, our shadowy friends will push the VIPs to us, then we exfil to the secondary rings. We’ll have upwards of an hour until full extract off the station. Hope for less of a wait, but plan for more!”Ai’s hands were shaking from her heart rate. She was coated in sweat, not simply from the humidity of the rocketcan. Her vision had narrowed down to a tunnel.“Fuck,” she cursed under her breath with gritted teeth.“You oke Betty Blue?” Red Cap asked.“Acceleration is getting to me, but I’ll be fine.”Red Cap tapped Ai’s shoulder with a closed fist. “Anchuan shiyong.[87][Di Lingua]: Safe handling. ↑ Once we land, it’ll be just like that Old Towne operation—only this time they won’t know we’re coming!”“Oke, brace for docking burn,” Gray Top announced right before the rocketcan burned hard to match the ring’s slight spin near the central spoke.In microgravity, they offloaded into Grayson’s section of the space station. It was dim and dingy like any well-used working dock. In fact, it was entirely empty save for the legion of security scanners and the two Grayson Services Group grunts in armor almost identical to standard issue in the United Planets Marine Corps, save for the color scheme and the garish skeletal paint jobs over their faceplates. Ai’s EAR flashed and pulsated as some Shade cyberwar operator—probably on the other side of the ring hab—labeled and deactivated each security system.“We have to scan your tools,” a guard said when they saw the large toolbox they had brought.Ai groaned and held her stomach.“What’s with that one?” A guard grunted. “Huh?” Gray Top asked, confused.“That one, with the blue hair.”“Looks like they’re about to shit themselves, haha,” the other guard joked.“Doshirak didn’t sit right, ye?” Ai said as she played up the stomach pain from her adrenaline surge as if was food poisoning.“This going to be a problem?” Gray Top asked.The guard held up an ink display attached to the autonomous biometric recognition systems that had been scanning the four operators ever since they disembarked from the rocketcan. This didn’t worry Ai. Their sheep dipped identities were seal-solid. It took years to build up these fake identities, and they would burn them after this operation. And they were under the gentle over-watch of the Shades.“Nah. Just funny.”Distracted as they went through the usual legalese introduction and non-disclosure contract—all things an autonomous system could handle, Grayson’s penchant to flex human muscle notwithstanding—the guards did not notice as Red Cap and Green Dragon strategically positioned a few surprises around the docking bay. Palm-sized gray disks, left behind, discreetly. As the team entered the spin ring, they didn’t encounter any further issues. The group, a large toolbox in tow, flew down the microgravity halls to their go-point. Spin gravity gently asserted itself as they went further into the station. Eventually, it pulled them back to the ground; forcing them to walk the rest of the way to get into position.After meeting with their compromised asset, they each played their role as technical subcontractors while being escorted along the facility, checking each pseudo-mechanical computer that controlled critical life support systems distributed along the ring habs. They had some inside help. Sabotage had caused one of the life support monitors to fail critically, and Grayson was checking the rest for faults. All the while the team worked their way to the mission critical intersection in the hab. It was at a junction near two rooms where subcontractors were absolutely forbidden. Likely the locations where Grayson Services Group had kept their hostages. Once they got in place, Gray Top sent out two bursts of static on his long-range radio.Their escort of Grayson soldiers yelled at Gray Top for unauthorized radio transmissions. He demurred and apologized, and played the part of over-his-head, sick-of-this-shit subcontractor with no loyalty to anything but a straightforward job and unreasonably high pay. Ai surveyed her surroundings. They were at a junction of two perpendicular paths along the ring hab. Doors lined the sides of each long hallway, and divots—like turnouts on a road—were also present every few meters along the halls. They would be a substantial source of cover in the upcoming firefight.In the middle of the argument with the Grayson soldiers, the operation began in earnest. The deck shook like an earthquake. Everyone fell over as the ring’s spin wavered. Everyone, that is, except for the five who knew it was coming and had gecko gripped to the floor.Even before the emergency klaxons began sounding, Ai and the other three operators had tranquilized all the Grayson personnel thrown to the floor and pulled them over to emergency air stations, disguising the drugged-out Grayson soldiers as simply a handful of contractors following standard emergency procedures. Their compromised asset also played along, allowing themselves to be tied up and placed into an opaque air hood like the others.Ai’s adrenaline rush was appropriate, but she knew that it was time to get to work, she was cool and calm. Her hands and breathing were steady. She cinched up the armor plating over her chest and back and got into position near the armor-lined toolbox. There, in the slight privacy the interior provided, she prepared her SSCAW hypersonic weapon, counting the extra magazines hiding among her tool pouches, checking the coil of the coilgun through the open bolt. She let the bolt slide back into a closed position with a solid, and satisfying, snap.“All guest workers, please exit the habitat immediately,” an auto boomed out across the halls over the emergency klaxons. “Hull breach. Hull breach. Hull breach.”Yellow emergency lights strobed. There was commotion in the halls as every room emptied and people headed to various emergency space tug exits. It was not an orderly evacuation. People were fleeing in all directions in a way that was immediately familiar. Despite their training, they had forgotten everything in the panic of reality. Snap snap. Distant hypersonic weapons fired. Ai flinched at the thundering reverberations and pulled the large hearing protection muffs that were resting on top of her safety helmet down, covering her ears. There was a pulse of static and then an eerie and total silence from the active noise cancellation. Red Cap was mumbling something next to Ai, Gray Top had gone completely silent, Green Dragon had a crooked, wild, smile on his face, and Ai was white knuckling the forward grip on her SSCAW, just barely concealed in the large toolbox.Snap snap snap. Muffled, but Ai heard the weapons fire in her bones.“Oke, they’re on their way!” Gray Top said. “Hold until we got EARs on the VIPs.”Down the hall, armored Grayson soldiers push past the increasingly dense and panicked crowds of unarmed Grayson personnel. Behind them there was a line of harried figures in gray fatigues—distinct from the usual Grayson color scheme of black, white, and blue everyone else was wearing. Green Dragon held up a device rigged up to look like some subcontractor’s tool, but at its heart there was an optical Application Specific Pseudo Mechanical Computer rigged just to identify twenty faces, and no one else.“VIPs confirmed,” Green Dragon said nonchalantly. “High match probability.”Across Ai’s EAR nameplates popped up above the Grayson hostages. One hostage froze in fear—Chaeyoung according to the nameplate on Ai’s EAR—and stared right at Ai. Ai’s face flushed, her nerves frayed, but she just stared right back at Chaeyoung.A guard grabbed Chaeyoung’s arm from behind and growled. “Keep fucking moving!”It was clear and crisp from noise cancellation.“Weapons free. Keep your backgrounds clear as crystal,” Gray Top said.In one smooth motion, Ai dropped to her knee, pulled her standard sub-compact automatic weapon up to her shoulder. In a fraction of a second, EAR systems synced. She aimed for the head of the soldier who had grabbed Chaeyoung. Her heads-up display glowed with all the indications her background was clear, checking sensors and any other data and drawing a cone twenty degrees wide from the back of the soldier’s helmet on Ai’s EAR. Nothing but the guard and a bulkhead in the cone. She let the working exoskeleton of her armor guide her arm and lock her into a stable firing position. Not even half a second after she pulled the weapon from the cart, she inhaled and squeezed on the exhale. Snap. Pop.Ai’s shot went clean through her target. The soldier’s head popped in a geyser of red and gray, drenching Chaeyoung in blood. Too clean. Krump. Pop. A fist-sized hole in the bulkhead behind the guard’s head was now a black hole, leading to the vacuum of space. There was the distorted bzzzt as Ai’s ear protection cut down the noise of decompression winds.Already Gray Top and Green Dragon were advancing down the hall, each ducking into the slight cover of divots. Ai knew Shades were pushing Grayson forward from the other side, and she saw their orange translucent silhouettes far in the distance on her EAR, well past the station’s horizon where she was standing.Red Cap was covering her right flank. Ai ran ahead as Gray Top and Green Dragon covered her with coilgun fire. In one second flat, Ai was in front of Chaeyoung. She looked down at the hostage’s face. Twisted and stuck in shock and fear, pinned under the body of the Grayson goon neutralized by Ai.Snap. A red tracer exploded centimeters to the left of Ai. A VIP in a gray jumpsuit went down, slammed into a bulkhead. Krump. Another hull breach. Ai did not flinch, pulled the body off Chaeyoung. Chaeyoung pushed away from Ai then fell backwards. Another hostage—Vis-viva, mission critical—stumbled forward. Chaeyoung was too far, Vis-viva was within arm’s reach. Ai grabbed Vis-viva.Someone in a gray jumpsuit with ochre dreadlocks—nameplate said Ali, mission critical—screamed something. Even though the din drowned out the sound of their shouts, Ai could read their lips clearly. “Stay down!” Ali pulled Chaeyoung and another hostage away from safety and down to the floor.More red tracers exploded. Pop. Snap. She felt their wind, heard their secondary N-wave snap as the hypersonic rounds zipped past her head, and making a pucker inducing tingthud as they hit something behind her, exploded, or bounced. The hallway air was thick with a fine molten dust of metallic debris, blood, and bone. Vis-viva coughed. Ai pushed her VIP ahead. They were moving, filter plugs in Ai’s nose, keeping her airways clear. Extract the VIPs. That was her job. Snap snap pop snap. Crossfire. Return fire. Blue tracers from friendlies, red tracers from the opposing forces.“They’re breaking through from behind!” Gray Top said as Ai took cover behind him in his turn-out nook. “We can’t hold the intersection for long!”“Bug out?” Green Dragon asked from across the hall.“We got a primary target,” Ai explained between heavy breaths.“Name?” Gray Top demanded.Ai slid over the far side of the nook, looked around the turn down on their right flank. Her EAR painted five targets. Advancing on Red Caps position parallel to the wall of the nook. Clean backgrounds. Brzzt. Her SSCAW spat out the rest of the projectiles in its magazine. Silhouetted targets fell back or fell down.“Silva,” Ai said as she ducked back so the intersection’s corner was between her and the intersection’s right flank.Ai let the empty magazine slide out of her SSCAW, replaced with a fresh one with a quick slap. Vis-viva was shouting something at them, but she was not on their radio frequency, and the combination of decompression, hypersonic weapons, and Ai’s ear protection drowned it out.“Lot of heat from our flanks,” Ai said.“One out of three is minimum viable success,” Green Dragon observed.Gray Top popped the optics of his weapon out of cover, scanned the hallway where the other hostages were, and cursed under his breath. “They’re pinned down and Grayson is using the rest as human shields! Time to extract!” Gray Top ordered.There was a thunderous clap clap as Red Cap unloaded down the hallway on their right flank, then blurred past the intersection, sliding to take cover behind the armored toolbox. Green Dragon followed suit, firing high above the heads of the soldiers using hostages as human shields, before he joined Red Cap behind the toolbox. Then Ai, pushing Vis-viva ahead of her, ran for it, firing behind, using her EAR optics to aim as she sent covering fire down their right flank. Then Gray Top did the same, laying down covering fire as he went.“Pop our surprise before we get to the rocketcan!” Gray Top ordered before the four of them continued their leap frog retreat out of the ring hab.It was a mad rush. Whip snaps of hypersonic weapons fire nipped at their heels, then dulled. The whoosh of depressurization turned to a trickle of a breeze the further they got from the mayhem. They reached their dock without incident. Instead of guards, there were two red smears on the bulkhead walls. Their little leave-behind surprise had gone off without a hitch. Vis-viva was still shouting and resisting, but they ignored her as they hurried onto the rocketcan, strapped down into the flats, and burned hard to extraction.