Hope in Hel (The Echo Case Files)

Hope in Hel

The Echo Case Files, Book 2

Copyright 2015 C.S. Stinton

Published by C.S. Stinton at Smashwords

Graphic Design by Double Marvellous (http://www.doublemarvellous.com)

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

About the Author

Other Books by this Author

Connect with the Author

For Albert,

Our fearful trip is done

Chapter 1

The only good thing about the gunfire was that it didn’t hit her. Dust exploded as the bullets thudded into the low wall, a steady spray she knew was meant to pin her down. It was doing a good job, she reflected, because if she so much as twitched out of cover she’d get her fool head blown off. For now all she could do was hunker down and pray.

Salvation came long heartbeats later with a roll of thunder, or so the gunshots from her left sounded when they cut the onslaught short. As she fought to get her breath back in the echoing silence, she decided her foray into religion was at an end; no loving God would send Staff Sergeant John Harrigan as her divine saviour.

Commander Sara Ramirez uncurled from her foetal position and risked a peek over the remains of the wall. An empty yard stretched between them and the dark and silent farmhouse, and not for the first time, she was reminded of a sniper and a dark alleyway in Hardveur. ‘Good shooting.’

Her partner trotted over from his patch of crumbled masonry and rammed another clip into his sidearm. ‘You know, I reckon they’ve gone and spotted us.’

She glared. ‘You think? They’re probably shooting the hostages in there right now.’

‘If they were shooting hostages we’d hear them. Nah, they’re going to wait until we’re close. Human shields.’

Ramirez looked to the upper windows and the desolate grey skies above. He was right. They’d done their best to make their advance on this farmhouse, adrift in a field with only the ruins of its barns as cover, discreet. A misjudgement of the insurgents’ patrol patterns had blown that to hell, and though they’d gunned down the two-man wandering guard and Harrigan had shot the third inside the building, this wasn’t anything textbook.

Maybe a textbook screw-up.

‘Negotiators, huh?’ Harrigan looked unfazed. ‘Can’t trust them to diffuse one little abduction.’

She resisted the urge to clip him around the ear. ‘Take this seriously, won’t you? There were only six of them, and we’ve taken three. The others will be upstairs with the hostages.’

It was raining, a drizzle that wouldn’t drench but soaked into her hair, her uniform, and promised to leave her soggy throughout this nightmare. She double-checked her sidearm still had the better part of a clip left, and nodded at the building. ‘We’ll loop around the back, clear the downstairs, then work on up. Silent approach if possible.’

‘I got your six,’ Harrigan said, still grinning his insufferable grin.

Ramirez reasoned that if any more insurgents could see them, they’d shoot. The Confederate Marshals were lucky to have escaped unscathed, but the training that had filled the first two weeks of their partnership had seen them smash the marksmanship requirements. Expertise in a shooting range was so far extending to expertise in the field. The mission had gone to hell, but they’d given hell back.

They closed the distance between the barn, collapsed through years of neglect and erosion by the miserable, soul-sucking weather of this dreary corner of the Confederacy, and the farmhouse itself. Grey stone and simple, traditional construction identified it as one of the first permanent structures of the early colonists, and the walls gave some meagre shelter from the rain.

If they were spotted, they saw no sign of it. Gesturing for Harrigan to follow, Ramirez cleared the corners and looped to the back, avoiding the farming equipment abandoned on the ground, as if the owners had run out one day and never looked back.

The rear door was wooden and rickety and a silent entry was not guaranteed, so Harrigan advanced, the former Marine better at this close work. The door gave a creak no louder than the rain thudding on the roof tiles when he eased it open with his foot.

Ramirez followed him inside like a shadow, clearing the left as Harrigan cleared the right. Dangling pots and pans welcomed them to the kitchen, and he had to duck to make for the open door leading to the depths of the dank, dusty house. A glance into the sitting room confirmed the gunman at the window was dead, and then came the stairs. Neither spoke as they climbed. A step creaked under Harrigan’s foot and she saw him scowl, concentration now in his eyes, but they didn’t stop. They would have to be fast if they wanted even half a chance.

The two doors on the landing led to empty bedrooms, which left the master bedroom at the far end. They’d cleared everywhere else. The three remaining insurgents and their hostages, the family the report said had been abducted and dragged out here, had to be inside.

‘I’m kicking that in,’ breathed Harrigan, ‘and we shoot the hell out of anything if it so much as twitches in the direction of a hostage, agreed?’

Despite herself, Ramirez nodded. It was one thing for her to risk her own neck for principles, but the insurgents knew they were there and had been given ample opportunity to surrender. This had to be, above all, about preserving the lives of innocents.

Harrigan’s boot hit the ancient wooden door with a crack, and it shattered open. He was inside a split second later and she followed to take in the scene without blinking, years of training giving her a tactical assessment within a thoughtless heartbeat. Two children, tied up and pressed against a plain bed. A man, bloodied and beaten, kneeling on the bare wooden floor. A woman in the iron grip of one of the gun-toting insurgents, and two of his allies by the wall.

The first yanked her to him as a shield before either Marshal could blink, but the others were not so lucky. One lifted his gun and was dropped by a snapshot from Harrigan; the other lunged for the man on the ground. Instinct took Ramirez over and her trigger-finger merely twitched before he was gone, the sounds of the twin gunshots thunderous against stone walls.

But that still left the one with a sobbing woman in his arms, his gun pressed against her temple. ‘Stand the hell down!’ he bellowed, bringing both Marshals to a halt. ‘One more step and I’ll blow her fucking head off, I swear.’

Ramirez levelled her Hauer 55, but he kept himself behind the weeping woman. ‘It’s over,’ she said, forcing her voice to sound steady. ‘Your allies are dead, and the local PD are inbound with more men. If you surrender now, you’ll make it easier on yourself.’

‘To go to prison and rot there with no parole? I don’t think so – hey, don’t you move!’ The insurgent rammed his pistol harder against the woman’s head, eliciting a low moan, and glared at Harrigan, who had been looping left.

‘You kill her and I’ll blow your head off here and now,’ Harrigan said.

‘That’s still one dead woman. So you can do that, or you can let me walk out of here with her, nice and slow, and get to a car. What do you think?’

I think that you’ll kill her anyway, Ramirez thought, and opened her mouth to speak.

But Harrigan was there first. ‘I think you should go to hell,’ he said, and fired.

The bullet thudded through the hostage’s shoulder, and she screamed – but such a high-calibre round kept going, and Harrigan’s aim had been perfect. A shot to the woman’s shoulder was a solid round in the insurgent’s chest, and he dropped like a stone with a surprised gurgle.

Ramirez dove, not for the motionless insurgent but the woman, whose shoulder was already gushing blood. ‘Harrigan, what the hell do you think you’re doing?’

‘Ending this stalemate. Oh, she’ll live, it’s just her shoulder - and will you two shut up?’ Harrigan rounded on the children, who had burst into raucous sobs.

‘Don’t shout at them!’ Ramirez clamped her hands to the wound as the woman went limp, shock setting in.

‘Why the hell not, it’s not as if it’s –’

‘Simulation over.’ The voice came from above, from speakers embedded into the ceiling, and held the sterile tones of an automated computer system.

It’s not as if it’s real.

The building remained, because the building was real. But the crying children, the bleeding woman, the battered husband, and even the dead and dying insurgents all disappeared as the holographic projectors built into the old farmhouse’s ceiling and floors killed the training session, leaving the two of them in a cold, empty room.

For a long moment there was no sound but their ragged breathing and the dripping from a leak in the roof. Then Ramirez rose, the blood on her hands gone with the rest of the simulation. ‘What the hell did you think you were doing?’

He blinked. ‘Killing the enemy. He was shaky and frantic and you weren’t going to talk him down before he twitched and shot that woman.’

‘So you thought you’d shoot her first? You read the briefing; we’re the first people on site, there’s no local PD or medics outside! It’d be a good ten minutes before any backup could arrive and I didn’t have a medkit!’

‘She stood a chance! A better chance shot in the shoulder than shot in the head.’

‘You know what makes the best chance of all?’ Ramirez rammed her sidearm, a training weapon tagged into the whole simulation, into its holster at her hip. ‘Not shooting her!’

‘Um.’

They turned to the doorway to see not just Lieutenant Calhoun, the Confederate Marshals’ training officer, but also Petty Officer Kevin Weiss, damp and awkward. Calhoun, a gaunt, pale man whose hangdog face made him perpetually woebegone, tapped his pad with even more disapproval of the universe than usual.

‘Commander? Sergeant? The Director wants you,’ said Weiss.

‘The Director can wait,’ said Calhoun, like he’d had this row already. ‘I need to give them their rating.’

‘Really, sir? Commodore Tau wants to see them and – I don’t think a training session’s really as important as a personal summons…’

‘He’s right,’ said Harrigan, and grinned at Calhoun. ‘Besides, I reckon we hit ninetieth percentile.’

‘That’s optimistic,’ said Ramirez, ‘seeing as we blew our approach and you shot a hostage.’

‘We didn’t blow our approach. They were always going to spot us.’ Harrigan nodded at Calhoun. ‘That’s right, ain’t it, Ell-Tee? This was the everything goes to shit scenario, where no matter how careful our approach, out here with no backup, they were going to spot us and try to kill us and we had to make the best of a bad situation.’

Calhoun’s lips thinned in a way which told Ramirez her partner was right. ‘You lost points for shooting the hostage.’

‘Oh, c’mon, how else was that scene going to end? She weren’t going to talk him down.’

‘It’s a possible outcome of the scenario. As was getting a shot on him without hitting the hostage.’

‘If I aimed for his head, the only part I could see, I risked hitting her in the head or missing and then he killed her anyway. Even if I managed it, you should be smacking me around for risking her life.’

‘Risking her…’ Ramirez stared at Harrigan. ‘You still shot her!’’

‘There was no easy win!’ He rounded on Calhoun. ‘Has anyone ever talked that crazy son of a bitch down before?’

‘It’s meant to be a very difficult victory condition in a very different scenario, but –’

‘Has anyone?’

Calhoun jerked his chin up an inch. ‘Yes,’ he said, and his gaze flickered to Ramirez with almost bashful deference. This was unusual for him, and her eyes narrowed. ‘Major Durand.’

Ramirez’s jaw dropped. ‘You’re kidding.’ She turned to Harrigan. ‘We’re doing it again.’

‘Are you nuts? Considering there’s no easy win, we aced that one!’

Calhoun shook his head. ‘And you don’t get to re-sit scenarios like that. It defeats the object.’

‘And I ain’t doing it just so you can try to beat Durand!’

‘Also,’ came the weak, desperate voice of Kevin Weiss, ‘the Director really does need to see you.’

At last she remembered Weiss. ‘What does she want?’

‘I don’t know! But she sent me to drive you back to Glitnir, so I reckon it’s more important than your umpteenth training session.’

She pointed at Harrigan. ‘I am not taking this reprobate into the field as a Confederate Marshal until I’m satisfied he is capable of upholding the principles of the office.’

‘Ah, shove it someplace unsavoury, Ramirez, I’ve aced the tests so far. And ‘sides, we go into the field when Commodore Tau says she’s got a case for us, not on your say-so. I don’t know about you, but I don’t fancy keeping her waiting.’

Calhoun made a face. ‘I’ll have your full post-scenario assessment broken down and ready within the hour.’

‘And we can’t wait, Ell-Tee, but for now, we’ve got business.’ Harrigan gave the Training Officer a cheery wave as he headed for the door, Ramirez grabbed by the elbow to follow.

She opened her mouth to protest, but instead pulled free and walked under her own steam. While instinct demanded they finish a training debriefing, assess every inch of the operation they’d spent the whole day working on while it was fresh in their minds, she had no desire to incur the wrath of Director Tau. Besides, Weiss looked like he was either going to shout or burst into tears if they made him wait any more.

The skies of Forseti, one of the smaller and more inconsequential moons of Baldr, were as grey and dreary as ever, and it was still drizzling when they stepped outside. The farmlands stretched bare and empty and desolate across the west, but to the east she could see the city skulking against the skyline like a crumbled mountain, all past grandeur reduced to rubble.

There were many farms like this outside Glitnir. When the military moved the bulk of their operations off-world, the Navy’s business in the Altair System now conducted out of the central planet Odin, the local economy had imploded. Twenty years on, when the Orion Confederacy Marshals Service set up office in the hollowed-out remains of the military’s passing, it had been cheap and easy to find old urban and rural ruins to purchase, or simply claim, for the purposes of training.

They passed the remains of the barn where they’d taken cover, the walls now bereft of bullet holes and as intact as the ramshackle stone had been before the simulation, and carried on to the pre-fab temporary huts, set up by Calhoun’s team to monitor the day’s exercise. They would not be the only officers going through this scenario today, and Ramirez hoped they wouldn’t run into Alpha Team on their way back to HQ. She disliked lying to colleagues she liked, but Calhoun would go spare if they gave anyone else a warning.

Weiss had brought one of the Marshals Service’s old vans, which under normal circumstances would have been pulled from general use, and Ramirez climbed into the front next to him, relegating Harrigan