God's Dogs

At the time in Israel there was no king. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

Judges 21:25

Special forces have been strategic weapons, since their formal beginning in 1941 with the British SAS. Most recently, they disrupted the strategic goals of the Empire by gaining the intel for the League to ambush the Empire fleet.

SpecOps were also weapons to advance the League’s strategic goals. Masters Chin, Lu, and Wong were part of the Penglai strategic planning committee. The eight-person committee met periodically to review League strategy as it evolved, and the committee offered Penglai’s strategic suggestions when appropriate.

With the Penglai Exemption, though, Penglai gained more autonomy. The League could identify a strategic objective, but Penglai would now control how to achieve the objective. The bureaucrats at League HQ were not happy with that development, but Penglai had insisted. They were done with the counter-productive, micro-management League’s bureaucrats were capable of. In peacetime, slow growth was sure growth, but war demanded some level of expediency.

Besides, one of Penglai’s strategic goals was to push the League to its next organizational evolution. Penglai was aware that no bureaucracy in history had made that leap, and it was a necessary leap. Greater collaboration between the League and its member worlds would achieve the further goal of protecting Empire worlds from plunder.

Master Chin addressed this topic in the conference room on the military space station orbiting Penglai.

“The five poisons are the perennial problem. Ignorance, greed, hatred, pride, and envy. The League bureaucracy must curb each in order to collaborate more fully with its member worlds. How can we force that outcome?”

The other seven in the room chuckled. Forcing outcomes was counter to all they learned growing up. All were masters from different monasteries. All went through the same education and training. Each then went onto specialized training in different fields: intelligence, logistics, R&D, command, and personnel. Wong was attached to R&D, while Chin was in charge of military training, and Lu was operational director of special forces.

There was a lot of overlap and collaboration, since one requirement for membership in this committee was to have addressed those five poisons in themselves.

Master Running Bear, a squat man with a lined, round face and a gray ponytail, was a leader in the command network. He answered Chin, “The flow of events must be such that they have no choice. The spring flood pushes all before it. We must be like that.”

“Agreed,” Chin said. “If we hit the right soft spots in the Empire, it will implode. The power vacuum will pull the League as strongly as a spring flood.” He turned to the intelligence chief. “What are those soft spots, Carlos?”

Master Carlos was descended from Brazilian stock. He was dark with curly black hair and a lean body. He answered, “The population suffers from three generations of indoctrination. You have true believers and an underground resistance. Not much complacency either. There are mandatory political rallies on all worlds. However, in their military, the common troops are becoming more and more disillusioned.

“In our last action, when we ambushed their deep space fleet, sailors and marines ejected in escape pods before any ships surrendered. When we interrogated them, they were uniformly glad to be free of the Empire. By contrast, the officers were more truculent.

“Our thinking is it would be easy to sow strife in the enlisted – well, conscripted – ranks.”

“Mutiny?” Lu asked.

“Not without officers.”

“That makes sense,” Chin nodded. “Perhaps we could set up a pipeline to funnel deserters to League space.”

The master from personnel, Consuela, interjected, “Not without their families.”

Consuela was of Basque descent and was like a force of nature. Strong facial features in a fit, matron’s frame. She leaned forward. “You’ll have to coordinate with each planet’s resistance people. Get the families out, and the troops can’t be held hostage.”

Carlos grimaced. “I suspect many of those families are true believers.”

Chin said, “We need to coordinate with the resistance people. They would know. Do you have people in place for that?”

“No. I’d have to reach out to League Intelligence. I’ve been concentrating on the bio-weapon threat.”

“How’s that going?” Master Brigitta, the logistics commander, asked. She was a tall, thin woman with pale gray eyes in a triangular face.

“Not well. I think we need to send in a Coyote team to get the information we need.”

Lu said, “Consider it done.”

Carlos sighed. He didn’t like putting people at risk. Then he shook it off and said, “I’ll talk to League Intelligence and begin setting up the pipelines on Empire worlds.”

Lu returned to the monastery and called Quinn’s team to his office. They were recently returned from their mission to Central. Linda met them in the hallway outside Lu’s office, and they entered together.

Lu motioned them to the cozy sitting area. Once all were seated, he told them, “You are going to infiltrate the black ops site where they are working on the bio-weapon. You will neutralize that site, and you will also ascertain if there are any backup sites.”

Quinn’s face grew grim. “Just us?”

“At the site, yes. We have Wylie and Rand in reserve in case there are backup sites. If so, they will deploy to those sites and neutralize them.”

Lu regarded them briefly before continuing, “We have floor plans, access codes, personnel allotments, and the like thanks to O’Brian.”

“Let’s hope they’re still current,” River said.

Lu nodded. “And finally Raina has new shields for Satya and for your suits.”

“I knew I liked that girl,” Moss grinned.

Linda asked, “Who’s Raina?”

River answered, “She was a young teen girl when we rescued her a while back. Moss was opposed to the mission, actually. The Empire wanted her because her implant A.I. achieved sentience.”

“Interesting,” Linda murmured. “Maybe I’ll get to meet her.”

“In fact, you will,” Lu said. “Three days from now. You’ll be getting new suits at the research station.”

Raina met them at her lab aboard the R&D space station. Master Wong escorted the team into the crowded working area. Technicians paused to greet the Coyotes, but they quickly went back to their work.

Raina’s infectious smile was the real greeting, and she hurried towards them.

“There you are,” she beamed. “My wonderful saviors. And you’ve grown by one.”

Quinn smiled back and received her hug. She went onto hug each of them but stopped to examine Linda.

“Amazonian?”

Linda nodded. “Belinda Morrison.”

Raina turned to Quinn. “So it’s true. You’re recruiting off-world.”

Moss stage-whispered, “Don’t tell anybody. It’s supposed to be a secret.”

“No, it’s not,” River said. Then to Raina, “You look well.”

Raina nodded, still smiling. “Thanks for keeping in touch with me.”

“Tired of all the tulku training yet?” Moss queried.

Raina’s eyebrows rose. “It’s been easy in some ways, hard in others. Grace had trouble with the Void.”

“Grace?” River prompted.

“My A.I. That’s a whole different story.”

Wong interjected, “The new shields come from Grace’s insights that were gained from Raina's forays into the Void.”

“It’s a weird place,” Moss confirmed.

Raina brightened and said, “Come with me. There’s a fitting room where you can change into your new skin-suits. Then we need to calibrate and test them. You’re the first to get them. I insisted on that.”

The process went on for most of the day. Raina stayed with them the whole time, hovering like an unsure adolescent showing off an accomplishment to her family.

The shield used phase technology that created a barrier around the suits. The barrier was a thin, inter-dimensional rift that could be manipulated up to three feet away from the emitters in the suit. Anything that hit the barrier disappeared as it was shunted to another dimension: projectiles, plasma, shrapnel, or anything that struck the barrier was gone.

The downside was they couldn’t fire weapons through it, nor even grab anything. Raina said she was working on that flaw.

Even so, the shield could be synched up to the weapons so that the shield turned off for the microsecond it took to fire them.

The team practiced with their suits and developed tactics to take advantage of the shield properties.

At the end of the day, Quinn speculated, “This ought to make our next mission a little safer.”

“How soon will you leave?” Raina asked. She didn’t look the least bit tired after how grueling the day must have been for her.

“Next week,” Quinn said.

Raina’s blue eyes filled with tears. “I worry about you, you know.”

Pax stepped forward and hugged her. She clung to him for a long moment then stepped back.

“I didn’t want to cry. You have enough to worry about without some needy half-trained tulku distracting you.”

River caressed her cheek, wiping away the tears. “You’re hardly a distraction.”

“Yeah,” Moss added. “We ask Master Lu about you all the time.”

“That’s helpful,” Linda said with dry sarcasm.

Raina laughed. Then she brightened. “I’ve got dinner ordered at a nice place. It will just be us.”

Pax put an arm around her waist. “Lead on. We do want to hear how your training is going.”

They came out of FTL above the solar system where their target was. Satya’s stealth system kicked in, and they headed in-system. It would take two days to infiltrate the system, which was well guarded by a squadron of Empire warships.

During the trip, the team ran simulations in the morning and practiced with their new suits in the afternoon.

At length, Satya approached the space station. It was a long central column with various sized rings perpendicular to the upright column. It was a structure research stations preferred, because each ring was self-contained and could be jettisoned if something went wrong.

According to O’Brian, the bio-weapon research was located on a bottom ring. Satya attached to a maintenance hatch, and the team disembarked. Satya released from the station and retreated to hide on a nearby asteroid.

River got to work on the hatch. Space stations routinely left hatches unlocked as a safety feature, but the central computer would notice when it opened. The hack Penglai’s tech people provided worked, and the team slipped into the station unannounced.

The local time was 0300. The corridors were bare metal; the floors, coated with a non-skid polymer. The outer corridor led to work spaces, each with environmental seals. At the center, where the ring connected to the core, the admin office and control center coordinated ring activity.

The team, in light armor with camo on, made their way to the command center. River entered the code and the door opened. Dodging a roving guard, the team rushed in and stunned the three on-duty officers. River got to work at the computer station.

After a few minutes, she reported, “They’ve got a second layer in here. It looks like a backup system, but it’s a separate operating system. I don’t know where it goes.”

Quinn replied, “Any alternate black sites?”

“Yeah. There’s four scattered through Empire space. I’m setting up a laser com-link to Satya to download the files.”

“Pax,” Quinn said. “Take out the rover. Moss, find a way to engineering. Linda set charges here and help River set up the alarm to abandon the station.”

Pax and Moss hurried off.

“Done,” River said a few minutes later. “But I’m getting activity from that other system. Something is going down.”

That ‘something’ became apparent when Moss reported, “The core is filling up with troops and security bots.”

Pax added, “They are coming through the overhead in the inside corridor.”

“I got it,” River snapped. “They’re going to trap us here and detach the ring.”

The monitor showed that the core of the station was filling up with bots and soldiers. They were also moving into the ring the team was in.

Quinn thought for a moment before ordering, “Blow holes through to the core.”

“Nice,” Moss snickered. “If they detach our ring, they’ll decompress the core.”

Soon the team was blasting holes in the walls with plasma and rail guns. Their new shields protected them from the return fire of both the troops and the security bots when they arrived.

Empire command blew the ring anyway. Not only did they blow it away from the core as two hemispheres, they waited until the two halves reached a safe distance and blew those up as well.

The lower core decompressed, sucking bots and soldiers into space. The team was now in the core but separated from each other. They activated their magnetic boots to keep from getting sucked out themselves.

“Moss,” Quinn said. “Can you get to engineering?”

“I think so, but I might have to do it from outside. It’s a mess in here, and engineering is three levels up.”

“Pax, go with him.”

“On it,” Pax replied.

“River, find a comm terminal and warn these people to abandon ship.”

“On it.”

“Linda, watch her back.”

“On it.”

“I’m headed to core command. We need more info. That second computer system might have info we need.”

They scattered to their tasks in the confusion generated by the blown ring and the decompressed core where the ring had been attached. Pax and Moss forced entry three levels up. Quinn took a while to get to the command level, which was five levels above engineering.

He jetted to a hatch, set a shaped charge that blew out both the outer and inner hatches. After interior walls dropped to contain decompression, he entered. There was a hatch in the wall twenty yards in, and he moved through it. The security bots were slow to respond, and Quinn traveled another fifty yards toward the command center before meeting resistance.

The bots engaged him, and soldiers were setting up a barricade. He linked his new shield to his pulse-laser rifle and took down the bots and forced the soldiers back. Then he blew the door to the command center.

It was a large room filled with manned stations and reinforced with two squads of soldiers. Quinn continued to cycle his shield and beam fire.

He came under intense return fire, and his HUD alerted him that the shield was weakening.

About then, though, the speakers announced an evacuation order, accompanied by a whooping siren.

Enemy fire slowed for a moment, and his shield began climbing out of the yellow toward green.

“River, reinforce Moss. Linda, meet up with me. Moss, blow this place in five mikes.”

Quinn found cover behind a console, fumbled for a hack stick, and eventually jammed it into a data port. The fire on him increased again.

He noticed the officer-in-charge at the rear of the room and cycled a grenade into the lower barrel of his rifle. He fired the grenade in the general direction of the officer.

The blast, as well as the evacuation order, broke the troops’ resolve. They began scrambling for the far exits. The surviving officers attempted to rally them, but Quinn was now targeting the officers.

Linda arrived, picking off the remaining bots, and Quinn fell back to her position. Then they leapfrogged to the blown external hatch.

Moss said, “Charges to blow in thirty seconds.”

Linda and Quinn jetted clear of the station. Moss, Pax, and River were already clear. They all headed for the ring debris to hide behind.

Escape pods now littered the space around the station. Their speed was impressive. The squadron of Empire ships were converging but at a slow pace. It looked like they were maneuvering to englobe the station but out of blast range.

Once Quinn was clear, he asked, “River, are you getting anything from my hack stick?”

“Yeah. It’s slow, but I’m getting it.”

“Not for long,” Moss chuckled.

The explosion was twofold. First a collapse in the center of the station, then a blast outward that shattered the rings. The core buckled and tore into two bulging halves. Both halves showed blowouts all along their lengths.

The blast sent the station pieces out at speed. Girders, shattered walls, mangled equipment, and other scrap metal slammed into the debris field the team was hiding behind. That provided some protection. Their shields provided some protection, except for Quinn’s already weakened shield.

“Shield failing,” Quinn said.

“Shut it off,” Linda said as she jetted to place herself between Quinn and the debris cloud.

She positioned herself and waited for a lull in the debris storm.

“I’ll shut mine off,” she said. “Attach to my suit, and I’ll activate my shield at its widest setting.”

“Okay,” Quinn groaned.

Once they managed the maneuver, Linda asked, “Okay back there?”

Quinn didn’t answer. She looked at her HUD and saw Quinn’s icon was yellow.”

“Moss?”

“I see it,” Moss replied. “Satya, we need immediate pickup and prep the med bay. We’ll need a stasis pod ready.”

“We’re inbound,” was the reply.