Chapter 1: The Mission

Raina was pissed off.

This was the screwiest mission she had been on so far. Her mate Murphy was alive and well and still fucking with her life. Gods, she hoped Dana was being good for her stepbrother Arthur and his wife, Grace. She was a lively kid and too smart for her own good. At least she liked the paint set she had bought her.

Boom ... Boom...

‘That was the signal, ‘ she decided. ‘Fuck! I hope I can fly this bloody thing, ‘ she thought as she ducked low and zigzagged between the search lights.

When she got to the hanger, she eased against the wall, breathing slowly to keep the noise down. She slid along the wall and cautiously looked around the corner. Her view was partially blocked by a low section of the wall being rolled out away from the centre in jagged edges.

The metal must have been more corroded than they had assumed. The wall had opened up like a shot up tin can. Spots of metal still glowed and smoke drifted into the icy air. The cold air was cooling the metal fast causing it to crackle.

She flicked her eyes around and spotted DT and KJ in their positions either side of the front of the building. She couldn’t hear anyone screaming or calling out to stop them. She checked again for cameras but couldn’t see any.

She inched down the wall to the hole, and she stopped when she heard metal scrape on metal. She listened carefully as she crouched down. She aimed her weapon in the direction of the noise. She watched as Ben inched carefully around the edge of the jagged metal on the other side of the hole.

Into her throat mike, she whispered, “Bang, bang, you’re dead.”

Ben nearly shit himself and jerked around. “Fuck Raina!” he cussed back softly, making her grin.

She checked back around and waved her handgun towards the hole, offering to let him go first. Ben got down on his hands and knees. He looked through cautiously and then wiggled his long frame into the faint light coming from the hole like a mouse into a hole in a wall. He was cautious of the still hot metal and jagged edges.

Raina appreciated the view of watching his sexy arse and muscular thighs wiggling past her, as she waited. She flicked her eyes away, checking around again, but it was still eerily quiet. The wind had dropped off, and the treeless white landscape lay still as if it was sleeping.

This worried her more than anything else did. If what they were looking for were inside the hanger, she would have thought that the owners would have had better security. But the silence said differently.

Perhaps it was a red herring, and the information was false. It wouldn’t have been the first time. When they had gotten here, all they had found was the small plane hangar at the end of a very short disused runway, just like the Intel said.

Snow drifted across the airstrip and road lazily, in the odd light gust of wind. It was friggin cold. Lights mounted on the hanger flicked back and forth over the ground surrounding the building in random patterns. It bothered her that the lights were active when there didn’t appear to be any other security at all.

“Clear,” Ben said into her earpiece.

Raina eased around the jagged metal and wiggled inside. She stood to find old mercury vapour high-bay lights, hung crookedly from the ceiling. At least two-thirds of them were out, and the rest showed the bulbs hadn’t been changed in a long time. The fluorescent coating of some had broken away giving the odd sharp blue/white glow.

The rest of the hanger was empty. It had been entirely cleared out of anything man-made. Snow had managed to seep in through small holes eaten into the walls and the roof. Patches of ice lay scattered over the floor.

The floor was as slick as an ice rink. The walls on close inspection were showing their age. Raina hoped the place didn’t fall down on them. She walked over to Ben. He looked at her, and he shrugged. Both were feeling that this was a bust and that they would be going home empty handed.

Ben relayed his findings to DT and KJ and told them to pull back closer. The boys answered and told them there was still no movement outside. The satellite feed didn’t indicate anything within twenty klicks of them, and they were coming in because it was friggin cold.

‘They were there, so they might as well check it out anyway, ‘ she thought. They made their way to the office area down the back. The short spikes in their boots cracking the thin coating of ice. They moved slowly and carefully, mindful of slipping and falling.

Raina checked her minder, it read: 2:32 a.m., 04/05/2057.

The data file had said this hanger had been here for close on a hundred and thirty years.

They had to use the explosives because the walls were made out of a two layers of 5mm thick stainless steel separated by 100mm square box steel frame. The doors for the hanger and even the personnel door had been welded shut.

They had even welded the hinged side and the top. Ben had found a hole in the side wall about a metre off the ground and dropped the explosives in it. When it blew the sidewall, it had peeled the two layers apart like paper poked with a pencil. Raina considered that since it was supposed to be stainless steel, it was poorly made.

The town of Iultin, Eastern Russia, had been abandoned just before the turn of the twentieth century. It was a mining town in the middle of nowhere. This hanger was located in a small valley on the opposite side of the mountain that had been mined for tin.

The team had been dropped off in Chariot, Alaska two days before. The Mark VI ATC (Air and Terrain Craft) they had been given was about the size of a wide twelve seater mini-bus with the ends of the cab section rounded off, and the front and back sections curved down from the roof.

It had been developed as an infiltration vehicle, and it was capable of travelling at 300 km/hr and up to a height of 500m. It didn’t have the same restrictions as the commercial lingers. At lower altitudes, it operated the same with four fans providing the lift, and travel and it could skim along at 120 km/hr up to a height of 30m.

The exceptions were the short fold-away wings and the small fuelled booster engines that were mounted on the underside to provide the extra height and speed that was restricted by the weight it carried. The tinting of armoured windows and windshields made it hard to see the number of occupants.

Only the Australian Military owned them, and theirs was a new prototype. It could be landed and driven like a car, but this was a last resort and parking feature. Special buffers and the design of the blades were used to muffle the noise of the fans. The fans were tilted down in front for thrust and up for braking.

It was a hell of a lot quieter than a helicopter. The ATC was big enough to seat six people with their gear. For this mission, it only had four occupants. It had behaved well enough when flying across the Bering Strait. Then they had hit a little snowstorm still 50km from their destination.

It wasn’t up to blizzard standards. The booster engines didn’t like sucking in the ice crystals and Raina had to start nursing them. The ice pelted the ATC like gravel and Raina wasn’t surprised the engines didn’t appreciate the weather.

She had dropped their altitude and speed to try to keep them going, but the engines were not happy campers, and at still 20km out, she’d had to shut them down. She then had to keep the ATC at close to the 30m mark and drop the speed to 50kmph in order to see anything and not run into outcrops.

The storm had finally moved off. Raina then found if she dropped down to the preferred 10m mark, it kicked up the fresh fluffy snow and further blinded them and their sensors.

The terrain wasn’t helping either. The mountains caused updraughts and open pockets of air that tossed them around even at 30m from the ground. The slopes and moving snow also made it difficult, as it upset the ground-finder and proximity sensors.

They needed some serious adjustments made to them, she decided. They had hoped to land closer to the hanger. However, the snow plumes from the fresh snow, when they dropped near to the ground, would let anyone watching see them. So they had ended up three clicks out and parked in a side valley.

She had nosed the ship under the best overhang she could find to help hide the residual heat signature that would be easier to pick up now the ATC wasn’t moving. The reflectors only hide so much.

At this time of year, they had about eighteen hours of daylight to play with. About half of the day was gone. They had to hike to within sight of the hanger. The fresh powdered snow had them swearing as they struggled through the drifts. A soft breeze teased them the whole way and upped the chill factor.

DT and KJ had walked down the road a klick, set up motion sensors and then come back. They still didn’t wish to approach the hanger in daylight and had to wait until after midnight for it to be dark enough to move. They had eight hours to kill.

Their spy satellite hadn’t tracked any activity here for more than two weeks. The last recorded vehicle hadn’t hung around long and had headed back to the nearest town. So far, they hadn’t discerned any pattern to the visits in the three months it had reportedly been under observation. It had been more than a month since the previous visit.

They elected to camp close enough for any vehicle movement to wake them, as the sounds carried a long way in the treeless landscape. They pitched the small tents behind a drift. DT and KJ shared one and Raina got to share with Ben.

The tents weren’t real big, considering none of them could be called petite.

Raina had ended up taller than her mother at 188cm.

Ben was just under the 2m mark. Their shorter friends Darren Topple - DT and Kori Johnson - KJ, topped in closer to 182cm.

Darren was leaner, darker haired and was dark beige in skin colour. Kori was a little bulkier, paler and had a lighter shade of brunette hair. They were good-looking, clean-shaven boys that women found approachable.

However, neither of them were guys you’d want to pick a fight with. They were both very proficient in unarmed and armed combat. They had been mates since they met as recruits and were both about twenty-three years of age.

Raina had cut her hair short, and the wisps of dark copper hair framed her face. She wouldn’t be considered a classical beauty but most men looked at least twice. Her sensual lips and sky blue eyes caught their attention, and the rest of the body was no hardship to look at either.

Ben was mid-beige like DT, with an interesting combination of Australian Aboriginal, Irish, English, Scottish and American Indian heritage in his background. His hair was also a dark brown with red highlights. It had soft waves that framed his squarish jaw and prominent cheekbones. It sat just above his shoulder blades. Longer hair was back in fashion for blokes.

Raina considered him a hunk.

The frigid air frosted their breaths as they worked.

They were wearing slim form-fitting flight suits designed for space that kept them reasonably warm in the chilly air. They had swapped the flight helmets for the special cold weather helmets designed for this mission.

The pull-down visors were fitted with a lot of the features that commercial Peepers had for watching videos and interacting with data files. Theirs, however, had a few extra features for tracking through hostile terrains, like zoom-able cameras with infra-red sensing and map tracking.

They weren’t however currently linked to the standard satellites, as that would make them easy to track by the locals. This was a stealth mission after all. They didn’t actually work for the Australian Military. Well, not officially anyway.

If they were caught, they were on their own. They would claim to be tourists that had gotten lost. The suits they wore were available after a fashion if you had the money. Their Id’s when checked would indicate they were Mr and Mrs Brown from Melbourne, Australia, and their two best friends.

The stamps and locations of their travels showed that they liked extreme holidays, in that they often went to out of the way places, to hike, climb cliffs and go caving. Their data would indicate they had flown into Egvekinot to the south. Not that anyone would remember them. It was thin, but the plan was to not get caught.

The lovely weather even in May was still bloody cold as they loaded their packs into the tents. They scooped snow over the edges of the dappled grey and white tents designed to make them blend into the landscape and then crawled in. A few hours of shuteye were welcome.

Raina was still wondering why she had agreed to this mission. She hadn’t worked with Ben for two years. She had made sure she wasn’t alone with him on the last mission. The bloke flicked her lust meter into the red on sight.

She had just been the pilot, on that mission, so it wasn’t that hard. It had been a drop and pick up mission on her part. The toughest part was fighting the desire to be alone with him. The tension between then was still thick, and the last look he had given her wasn’t a happy one.

They had a bit of history, and it wasn’t all good. The flight here had been just as tense, and the couple had barely spoken, letting DT and KJ control the conversation. She suspected her guilty conscious didn’t help.

When Ben had wrapped around her and pulled the extra-large space blankets over them to conserve body heat and keep warm, she had tensed up. “Shit Raina, are you ever going to forgive me?” he growled at her.

She wished it were that easy. She had a three-year-old bundle of gorgeous energy at home to remind her of their first mission together. She’d need a calculator to count the number of times she had wanted to blurt out her secret on the flight here.

She also knew it wasn’t his fault alone. She had spread her legs willingly enough at the time. To her knowledge, he didn’t know about the consequences. She had damn near lost her job after that little surprise.

She had considered termination, but she just couldn’t do it. With the fertility level of men being so small these days, the fact she had fallen at all was a miracle in itself. She may never have another kid.

Her mate Murphy must have been chuckling in his beer that night, the prick.

At just sixteen Raina had gotten into the Australian Space Force – the ASF.

It was a relatively new arm of the military, and they were taking in younger recruits in the last years of high school because they apparently adapted better to the challenging programmes. Raina’s mother wasn’t happy, but her step-father had encouraged her.

The recruits would be educated and gain skills they could use once they left the military. Raina wanted to fly, and this was her opportunity to do so. She had been fascinated with speed, flight, and space all her life so signing up was no hardship for her.

She suspected the reasons that Frank Walsh her stepfather had for supporting her, were centred on removing her from his son’s orbit. Arthur was his son from a previous marriage. He was six years older than she was and had become fascinated with her of late.

She had finally stopped growing upwards and had begun to develop all the right curves in all the right places, and he had noticed. He was as tall as she was and he had felt her up more than once on this trip home from college on the pretext of giving her brotherly cuddles.

Raina didn’t think it was because he liked younger girls, it was just that she didn’t look like one, being so tall. They had gotten on well enough when she was growing up, and he hadn’t shown interest in a sexual way, until this last time when he had come home for her sixteenth birthday.

She wasn’t genetically related to him, even if they had grown up together. However, they shared a nine-year-old sister. So it did have a little weirdness about it to Raina. The other thing as far as Raina was concerned, was that she didn’t fancy him, even if he was a nice bloke.

Frank had seen him kissing her. It was supposed to be a birthday kiss, but Arthur hadn’t been kissing her in a brotherly way. He’s slipped the tongue in and had explored. One hand had roamed while he kissed her and held her to his body.

Raina had wiggled out of his embrace and pushed him away before it got any hot and heavier. Other parts of his anatomy that he had pressed against her had warned her he wanted more than just kisses. She had laughed it off and told him it was the last lip kiss, he would be getting from her.