Going Dark Read Online Free PDF Page A

gen-com, her tone matter-of-fact. “Grenade.”
    Boom!
    Despite her warning, I flinch. That puts me into a skid and I almost go down.
    “One sensor out of the way, Captain,” Fadul reports.
    I see the flash of another RPG launch. “Fadul—”
    I want to tell her to take cover, but it’s already too late. The concussion shakes the ice. I don’t take time to see if she’s been hit. Instead, I take off again, running. The best thing I can do now is to help Roman take down the enemy.
    Roman, at least, is still alive. I see her ahead of me, using the arm hooks of her dead sister to try to scramble up an angled block of ice that’s leaning two meters into the air. “Behind you,” I warn her.
    “I’m losing my grip. I’m going to slide backward!”
    “No you’re not.” I crouch under her footplates and boost her up, guiding her feet to rest on my shoulder struts. “Steady?”
    “It’ll do.”
    Belly down on the jagged surface of the block, she lines up her weapon. I tap into her visor’s display to see what she sees.
    Kanoa is there ahead of me. “Mark,” he says, as a targeting circle appears in her field of view. The AI labels it as seven hundred meters out. Roman has the wind behind her. She lines up, takes three quick shots. All three hit a ridge of ice no more than a foot high. Something moves behind that ridge: a tiny figure wearing white camo, rigged in a dead sister, and equipped with night vision goggles. It jerks into sight and then falls back down.
    “Target down,” Roman whispers.
    “Confirmed,” Kanoa says.
    Holding my breath, I scan my squad icons, trying to see who got hit by the RPG—but everything is green. “Confirm. No casualties?”
    After a second, Kanoa echoes, “No casualties.”
    I step out of the way to let Roman slide down. An RPG is damned intimidating ordnance, but it has lousy accuracy at a distance.
    Dunahee is outraged all the same. “Fucker was shooting at me! Blew a black hole in the ice.”
    “Fucker was already out on the ice before we got here,” I point out, “patrolling with an RPG launcher as a sidearm. Whatever they’re protecting in there, they are serious. So we move in and we move fast. Go! ”
    Hit hard before the enemy can fully prepare: That’s still our best option. So I run, closing the distance between me and the bright, cheery lights of Deep Winter Sigil . Partway to those lights is a massive block of ice looking like the remnant of an iceberg, with a sheer face rising four meters above the surrounding floe. I run toward it, using it for cover. We cannot afford to get bogged down in an extended firefight. Here, on our own, in the dark of the polar night, we have no means to recharge our dead sisters once their power packs run down. We have to withdraw before that happens, or we have to take control of the platform and tap into Sigil ’s power grid. Otherwise, we lose.
    •  •  •  •
    As I run, I ask myself: What would I do if I were in command of the mercenaries aboard Deep Winter Sigil ?
    An oil-drilling platform is an amazing piece of technology, but it is not a fortress. It’s not designed to withstand an assault team armed with grenades and automatic weapons. If I commanded the defense, I would not risk my clients by hunkering down inside. I would not stage a battle that wascertain to destroy what I’d been hired to protect. Instead, I would deploy my soldiers from the south side of the platform, out of sight of the enemy. I would divide them in two groups, sending one east and one west, instructing them to use the jagged ice as cover while they get into position to trap their assailants in crossfire.
    If we still had angel sight, we could see them coming.
    We don’t.
    •  •  •  •
    A knob of ice explodes in front of me. Out of instinct I dive sideways, land on my arm strut, and roll, trying to make sense of an ominous blur of red and yellow icons flaring in my visor’s display. I come up on my belly to a fusillade of