Naryan was fighting the impulse to impatiently pace when her earpiece came alive once more.
"Viper One, Vipers," Lash's voice came on, sounding strong and clear. "Storage area with the liliths secure. Make the call, Viper Two!"
Smiling fiercely even as Narcist pumped her fist in victory, Truk laughing out loud, Ballan sighing with relief, and Absinthe crying softly with the release in tension, Naryan nodded.
"Copy that, Viper One," she almost joyously sent back.
Fordricht was letting his eyes scan over Nighthawk One's instrument panel as he sat in the pilot's seat when the comms came alive.
"Nighthawk One, Two," Tanner's voice said. Instantly the North African Ventru sat up, eyes narrowed.
"Two, One. Go," he said.
"Mission is a go," Tanner tersely indicated. "Roll in on the entrance, Evasive Pattern Delta and on the deck."
"Roger Delta on the deck," Fordricht replied as he had the pilot's seat move him into position. As the steering yoke hit his hands, he was twisting to yell down to the passenger bay.
"Galloway! Morel! We're going in!" Then he was pulling their gunship around and hitting the throttle.
Once again at ten klicks offshore as they waited for the word to deploy, it took a couple of minutes to cover the intervening distance at a mere ten meters off the ocean surface.
"Moving into position to drop our marines," Tanner announced as, on the monitor, Nighthawk Two peeled away from their trailing position.
According to Lash's active transponder, the liliths were being stored close to an underwater access point, likely for ease of protected and hidden transport. Which dovetailed nicely into Tanner's two-pronged assault.
With one squad of Force Recon, and two squads of Spec Ops hitting the front door, the initial plan was to take the enclave's submarine entrance as shown on the map to control the two major access points. However, when a transponder check put their commander right on top of a secondary submarine access, it worked better to tweak the attack plan to take that entrance instead. That way they could more easily exfil the captive liliths without fighting through the heart of the enclave.
Spotting the cluster of warehouses the infil team had marked as the entrance, Fordricht went guns hot then began pulling back from the controls.
"Bring us in nice and tight, One," he tautly instructed the gunship's AI. "You are cleared hot and free to fire on any and all hostile forces detected!"
"Roger, Operator Fordricht," the AI replied. "Sixty seconds to drop!"
The shifter at the enclave's checkpoint frowned as he heard a soft whirring sound from just outside. He glanced over at the rest of the checkpoint team and found them playing on their smartphones or staring off into space, smoking. If they had heard the sound, they were ignoring it.
Grimacing, he grabbed the strap of his assault rifle and slung it over his shoulder. Then he was walking towards the triangular opening to the outside.
Oddly the whirring sound got neither louder or softer as he approached the opening. With his rifle still on his shoulder, he pulled out a pack of cigarettes and extracted one to put into his mouth. He was reaching for his lighter when he finally stepped through the opening and out. Where he immediately came to a stunned stop at what his eyes saw.
It was some kind of ship, held aloft by giant fans as it hovered in place. Details were lost in the gloom, but he could see enough to watch eight figures drop out of the ship's belly on cords. Then he was jerking to the side as a piece of superheated ceramic punched into his forehead, the impact spinning him awkwardly around before he dropped dead, sightless eyes staring up at the night sky filled with stars.
"Viper Two, Strike One. We are on site!" Fordricht tightly announced over comms as his squad tactically advanced through the entrance. The rest of the shifters died in a quick series of single shots from smart-enabled Shiva's. Then, with Kali's held ready and in their hardened full tactical gear, they moved onto the stairs.
"Beginning our descent. Time to target with no interference: ten minutes."
Fordricht looked over his shoulder.
"Recon One, status."
"Shadowing, Strike One," Galloway reported, her squad smoothly following his down the stairs.
"Strike Two, status." That one over comms.
"Entering the enclave and beginning our descent, One," Jensen reported.
It had been his team the hapless shifter guard spotted dropping out of Nighthawk Two a few seconds ago. After dropping off Tanner and her marines near the market's sea entrance, it had swung back around in time to drop the second strike team only seconds after the Recon team hit the ground and Two pulled out to overwatch.
Nodding in satisfaction, Fordricht activated his tac helmet's Heads Up Display. It immediately filled with battlefield data being fed to it by a small computer in the helmet's rear. That computer quickly pulled and compiled data from a dozen sensors scattered throughout his tactical gear, including sensors that picked up his bio-status.
A tap on the computer's wrist-mounted interface and a marked map of the enclave appeared in his HUD, including the path the infil team took to the black market.
"Coming up on the second checkpoint, boss," Kazza, in position behind him, noted in a voice just loud enough to hear.
"Copy that," Fordricht said, his Kali already on his cheek. A tight gesture split the squad up to present less of a target. Then smart rounds were zipping past him to slam into the shifters and cromags manning the second checkpoint.
Naryan found herself looking back towards the entrance as the sound of distant gunfire reached her ears. Then Ballan was waving everybody back behind the corner.
Just in time: with footfalls heavy enough to be felt as they ran by, a full squad of cromags, armed with fifty caliber machine guns that looked too small in their hands, made their way past their position as they hurried down the twisting road.
"I'd say we got their attention," Truk muttered as the cromags were quickly followed by a couple squads of shifters, also heavily armed. "The question is: did they empty their garrison in an attempt to stop us at the stairs?"
"I say we go find out!" Narcist said fiercely, pulling both her sidearm and Stinger free with quick surges. Then she was going around the corner, forcing the other four to follow or get left behind.
Thankfully the herd of cromags going through their midst had pushed the crowd out in front of the black market to the very edges, many cowering in fear as they thought the worst: the Brotherhood had indeed invaded the enclave and was now slaughtering its way towards them! Ignoring them, the Vipers did a tactical run across the space and into the open door of the building.
"Hey! You can't ...uhhh!" The shifter flew back, a Stinger round in his chest, flung aside so hard he cracked the material making up the wall he slammed into.
"There should be a staircase straight ahead," Absinthe said, the tattooed Ventru vampiress right on Narcist's heels. Then Stingers were flaring once again and three more shifters that had tried charging in from the sides were sent flying through the air to either slam into something and drop, or just drop after a brief flight, knocked unconscious by the impact.
Right where Lash said it was, the straight flight of steep stairs at the back of the building dropped into the darkness. Already committed, the five vampires didn't hesitate, flying down the stairs as quickly as it was safe to do so.
Hearing the approach of several pairs of feet from his left, Lash gathered himself as he hefted one of the cromags' belt knives in his hand, which was more like a short sword to him, and turned to face the approach.
After cutting their way through the merpeople guarding the entrance, along with several submersibles of various size and technology, Tanner was the first of the marines to slowly surface, her Kali up and ready.
"Clear," she said after a brief recon and the rest of her squad bobbed to the surface of the oblong sea entrance.
It took a moment to clamber up on the edge and shed their wetsuits. Then, after a couple of adjustments to re-secure their tactical gear, they were gliding forward down the short corridor leading away from the door.
"I've got a good trace on Lash's transponder," one of her squad members indicated. Tanner nodded in acknowledgement as the transponder's pulsing light appeared on her HUD. Good; it appeared as if he was only a few meters ahead. Just behind a broad door in front of them, in fact.
Reaching the door, she waited a moment while her traps and munitions specialist gave it a quick scan for boobytraps and trip wires. Then, at her nod that it was clear, they pushed the door aside. And almost immediately staggered to a halt.
Surrounded by the untidy bodies of no less than a full dozen cromags and at least twice that many shifters, Lash was standing at the ready with what looked like a sword in his hand. Seeing that the footsteps he had heard on approach belonged to Tanner's squad, he relaxed ever so slightly.
"Tanner," he said, flipping the sword tip down into the floor. "Good to see you girls."
"Good to be in the fight, Lash," she quickly replied after a slight hesitation to get past the impulse to call him by his rank. Then she was stammering into silence as she caught sight of the captive liliths in their bondage suits.
"Dark Father have mercy on them," one of the other Force Recon legionnaires whispered hoarsely. "Are they still alive?"
"Each and every one of them," Lash grimly confirmed. "Their captors put them in those suits so they couldn't use their Compulsion on anybody. But they are fully contained. They just need air supplies so we can move them underwater. Once we have them on the Nighthawks, we'll peel those suits off them and get them all revived!"
Then he was reaching out to give Tanner a shake to break her out of her shocked reverie.
"You with me, Tanner?"
"To the end, Lash," she said smartly in return, giving her head a second shake to further clear it. "Where do we start?"
"Knife," he said, holding out his hand. Nodding, she pulled her belt knife out of its scabbard and handed it hilt first to him.
"I'm going to assume you brought extra air supplies in case we had to evacuate the liliths out through the sea entrance," he said, turning back to the liliths and walking towards the nearest one.
"Yes, s ... sure did," she said, barely catching herself. "Rollins, double time to the entrance and grab the go bag."
"Right-o." The named legionnaire turned and ran back towards the door they had come in. Tanner then joined Lash as he carefully walked around the dangling lilith in her harness. Seeing her beside him, he quickly pointed to the tubes in order.
"Air, blood, food, waste, and zombie lotus. Cut the last four as close as feasibly possible to the suit and tie them off so that they're waterproof. Then, when those extras get here, we'll tie off the air tubes and get them connected to the air supplies. Once that's done, we'll cut her down and move her to the entrance. Did you run into any merpeople outside?" he then asked without looking away from the tubes connected to the lilith's shield suit.
"Sure did. And we found out they don't like Stingers very much," Tanner replied.
"Heh, I can imagine. Seawater is one of the most conductive substances on the planet for electricity. Hopefully you gave them enough of a zap that they'll steer clear when we go back out."
Tanner nodded in agreement.
"We did see a handful of submersibles parked around the entrance on the way in as well," she reported. "Maybe we could use one of them to do our transportation."
Lash shook his head.
"It'd take too much time getting in without flooding the damn things and figuring out how to pilot them and fit all these liliths inside for a trip that's, what, fifty meters at most?"
He reached out and took hold of the tube he had named as having the potent drug with the powerful paralytic effect, zombie lotus. With a smooth stroke of the knife, he severed the plastic tube and let both ends dangle to allow the drug to drip out as much as possible. He then turned back to Tanner.
"This shifter syndicate has allies close by, or it wouldn't have grown so large. Allies that, while we could take them out, would delay us further and paint a target on us that the White Flames and the Hand may be looking for. Not to mention, there are traitorous vampires involved in this treacherous act so they may have already tipped either one or both of our enemies off. So, the sooner we exfil, the better. Now, if there was a cargo sled out there, preferably self-propelled, that we can use!"
Seeing Tanner frown, he sighed.
"Too bad. We'll have to get the Nighthawks to drop their cargo nets from open belly doors and pull the liliths aboard a few at a time. Get on the horn and tell Ellie, Dru, Fiadh and Meredith to be ready. We're going to need them to stabilize these liliths so we can get them out of their suits as soon as possible!"