[SF] Men in White

The primary optical feed on Sector 4's console glitched, throwing back the sickly neon green of a half-empty synth-stim can propped against the interface. Control slammed a palm onto the emergency override pad, belched wetly into her headset, and spat a curse that made the junior comms tech two stations over wince.

"God-fucking-dammit, Elias." She wiped her mouth on her sleeve, shoved a fistful of cold, salty nutrient-rations into her mouth, and chewed loudly through the next sentence. "You absolute brain-dead turnip. You were supposed to plant the charge and slip out like a fart in the wind. Now look at you, standing in a spotlight wearing a bedsheet in front of four heavily armored human gorillas."

Twenty light-years away, on the floor of the smuggling hangar, Elias didn't blink. His biometric telemetry read fifty-two beats a minute, steady as a metronome. The Aegis-silk suit hummed around him, throwing a blinding, sterile white against the hangar's rusted steel.

He shifted his grip on the sidearm, angling himself to keep both the giant in power armor and the surviving Vaelen guard in view. His voice came through the channel flat and low, nothing in it.

"Twenty-four seconds on the thermite, Control. Hatch four override code. Now."

"I'm typing, you arrogant prick, hold your horses." Control hammered a sequence into her cracked keyboard hard enough to make it rattle. "Station's sub-grid is wrapped in three layers of dirt-cheap alien encryption. Who designed this garbage interface, a blind squid?"

She ripped open a fresh pack of stims with her teeth and spat the foil onto the floor.

"And these Screaming Fist idiots, look at them." She leaned into the thermal display and snorted. "Lead suit, hydraulic fluid leaking out the knee joints, power pack strapped to the spine with actual duct tape. Grease-monkeys. Couldn't hit a barn from inside it, but they'll turn you into strawberry jam if you just stand there."

"Control." A kinetic round whined off the dead Vaelen's armor two inches from his boot. His cadence didn't change. "The hatch."

"Got it, you smug son of a bitch."

Behind him, ten meters back, the pneumatic seal on Service Duct 4 popped open with a hiss.

"Twelve seconds." Elias didn't look at the door, didn't look at the thermite core sizzling into the howitzer's autoloader. His visor stayed locked on the lead Fist's faceplate. "Exfil confirmed. Thanks for the bedside manner."

"Don't you 'thanks' me." Control let another low rumble roll out of her stomach, kicked her boots onto the console edge, and leaned back in her chair. "You ruin that suit, I'm deducting it from your pension. Move your ass."

Elias fell backward into Duct 4 three seconds before the thermite hit the howitzer's primary magazine.

The heat came first, a white hammer that blew the service grate off its housing and sent him sliding fifty feet down the vertical conduit in a cloud of vaporized tungsten and burning oil. Above him the hangar floor stopped existing. The autoloader went up in a shockwave that pulped the Vaelen guards, dropped the rafters, and buried the gun under thirty tons of molten scrap.

In the command spire of The Supreme Atlas, Control slapped her display to cut the static and sent synth-coffee across her keyboard.

"Visual's wiped! Elias, speak to me or I'm writing 'death by gross incompetence' on your file." She crammed a handful of crackers into her mouth and chewed through the silence.

The static broke. His voice came back low and even, the fifty-two beats still ticking across her monitor.

"Duct's secure. Thermite yield one hundred percent. Autoloader's slag." He landed light on his feet at the base of the drainpipe, the white suit throwing back the sub-station's dim red emergency light. "Heading to the exfil point."

"Don't get cocky." She let out a short, ugly burp and wiped her chin. "Heavy infantry didn't go down with the ship. Thermal's showing two of those grease-monkeys dropping the elevator shafts toward your level."

The corridor Elias turned into was damp and low-ceilinged. Three heavy kinetic muzzles were already waiting in the dark.

He didn't draw. The suit hummed, soaking up what little light there was, and he just stood there.

The man in the center stepped forward. His helmet seal hissed and the faceplate came up, revealing a scarred face caked in oil and sweat. Commander Kaelen.

"Put the gun down, bedsheet." His voice had the texture of gravel dragged across concrete. "We didn't come for the howitzer. We came to see if the rumors about the ghosts in white were true."

In Control's headset the telemetry flagged the standoff. "Oh, brilliant." She kicked her boots up onto the desk. "Surrounded by mutineers in a sewer. Elias, if you let these apes kill you I will haunt your funeral."

"Why are you here?" Elias kept his eyes on Kaelen.

"Warlord Vance isn't just selling artillery." Kaelen wiped grease off his brow, leaving a darker smear behind. "He's stripping the deep-crust mines on Kaelus-9. Selling raw, military-grade cobalt to the alien syndicates, enough to build a fleet of dreadnought hulls that could crush the Federation. We want to stop him. We can't get past the orbital defenses without an intelligence clearance."

"You want to sabotage your own Warlord."

"We're mercenaries, ghost, not traitors to our own blood." Kaelen's voice went cold. "Vance sold Earth's future for alien coin. Help us sink the cobalt, or shoot us now."

On The Supreme Atlas, Control's tone dropped out of its usual register. "He's not lying. I just pulled Kaelus-9's shipping manifests. Vance has three million metric tons of enriched cobalt sitting on the tarmac, waiting on an alien freighter. That metal leaves the planet, our shipyards lose their edge for a decade." A pause, knuckles cracking over the mic. "Change of plans, ghost. You're joining the circus."

"Understood." He lowered the sidearm. "Lead the way, Commander."

Sixteen hours after that, the high-gravity penal world of Kaelus-9 hit him like a wall. At four times Earth standard, every breath felt like inhaling wet sand.

The cobalt refineries ran underground, a maze of roaring furnaces and crushing pressure. Kaelen's Fists mounted a loud, bloody diversion at the main gate, breaching doors with hammers and rotary fire, and under cover of the noise Elias worked the upper catwalks alone.

The suit flickered into its blinding white, casting a strange, spectral light over the industrial dark. He moved fast and quiet, wiring breaching charges to the cooling manifolds of the planet's power grid.

Down on the tarmac, Warlord Vance, a brutal slab of a man in gold-plated armor, was screaming orders at the loading cranes while an alien transport dropped through the orange clouds above him.

"Get the crates on board! Kill those mutinous bastards at the gate!"

"Vance."

Vance spun. On the edge of the loading gantry, backlit by the burning refinery, the white suit cut a hard line against the soot-choked sky.

"What the hell are you?" He raised a plasma cannon.

Before he could fire, Elias triggered a thermal dump. The suit flared like a struck match, blinding Vance's optics and melting his targeting reticle in the same instant.

Vance staggered, cursing, firing blind into the glare.

Kaelen stepped out of the smoke behind him, rifle already up. "This is for Earth, you rat." He pulled the trigger.

The round tore through Vance's chest plate and dropped him onto the wet tarmac as the cooling manifolds behind him blew. The shockwave cascaded down through the deep-crust shafts and folded the mines in on themselves, a million tons of rock burying the cobalt for good. The alien freighter, its cargo gone, slammed its thrusters and fled for orbit.

Two days later the command deck of The Supreme Atlas was quiet.

Control sat in her swivel chair with a half-eaten protein wrap in one hand and a mug of synthetic chicory steaming in the other. Empty wrapper foils and crumpled diagnostic printouts covered the console around her.

The doors of Sector 4 slid open. Elias walked in wearing off-duty gray fatigues, the suit packed into a sterile bio-hazard case under his arm. His face was pale, his expression giving away nothing.

Control didn't turn around. She took a slow sip from her mug and let out a long, satisfied sigh.

"You look like shit." She tapped a key to close out the mission log. "And you owe logistics six hundred thousand credits for frying the Aegis-silk thermal coils."

He crossed to her console and set a small, unrefined chunk of dark blue cobalt down next to her keyboard.

"Vance is dead. The cobalt's ten miles under the crust. The aliens left with nothing."

She picked up the ore, turned it over in grease-stained fingers, and let a small, cynical smirk pull at one corner of her mouth before she tossed it in the trash next to her empty stim cans.

"Don't celebrate yet, ghost." She spun the chair to face him and threw a fresh datapad into his lap. "Intelligence picked up another leak, Sector 7. Some black-market outfit on a backwater moon is trying to sell a tactical nuclear autoloader to a delegation of insectoids."

He picked up the pad. His pulse, on her monitor, hadn't moved. "When do we leave?"

Control grabbed the chicory, put her boots back on the console, and belched loudly. "Five minutes. Go put your bedsheet back on."

Support me