Emiko made a show of stopping, looking around, and tugging at her loose jacket. The guard’s gaze returned.
“What?” Jan demanded, loud enough for the man across the street to hear. “You got a lead?”
Emiko glanced surreptitiously at the Truther guard, who was now looking right back. “I dunno. Maybe ... over there?”
Jan looked as well, then shrugged. “Let’s go ask him.”
The scowl the guard offered as they crossed the street clearly said Don’t ask me anything, dipshit. Jan smiled nervously and pulled his hands from his pockets. He elbowed Emiko as if reminding her to do the same.
The guard stepped forward. “That’s close enough.” He held a bolt-action rifle with a strap around his neck, but he didn’t point it at them, yet. “This is private property. Back off.”
“Hey there, playboy!” Emiko raised both hands high, voice trembling. “Got anything we can use?”
The guard’s eyes darted between her and Jan. “Nothing here for you, junkies. Den around the way might have what you need.”
Jan didn’t move. He kept his hands raised.
“But they’re all out,” Emiko whined. She pulled again at a halfway zipped jacket Jan knew offered enticing flashes of bare flesh and a worn black bra. “I have to get blissed or I’m going to lose my fucking mind, you know?” She stepped and stumbled.
The man spotted cleavage. His eyes went to cleavage.
“You got bliss in there?” Emiko tugged her half-zipped jacket way open as she rose and scratched her neck. “Wouldn’t be guarding a warehouse without something to sell, right?”
“Listen, lady,” the guard said, as he found her face again. “I said we got nothing for you here.” He took one more step and brought his rifle up. “Now, move—”
That was all he managed before Jan, who’d drifted out of his line of sight as he focused on Emiko’s cleavage, tossed a paralytic knife into his neck. The man’s eyes shot wide as his mouth opened, but no sound emerged.
Emiko dashed forward, caught the man as he slumped, and eased him down on the pavement in front of her. As Emiko knelt at his side, on the side away from the warehouse’s single door, Jan dashed toward the door and pressed himself to the wall beside it, on the hinged side.
Emiko pulled the knife free of the dying man’s neck, tucked it behind her back, and wailed like a woman who’d just seen her partner shot. “Oh God!” she shouted, loud enough that someone might hear her a block away. “Somebody help us! Help us!”
The warehouse guard spasmed against the biocrete as Emiko held him down, like she was trying to staunch blood from a wound. Jan heard boots on the other side of the armored door, then heard the snick of a door slit opening. He didn’t breathe.
“Who’s there?” Emiko gazed hopelessly at the door slit from at least three meters away. “Are you his friends? He just collapsed! I think he OD’d!” A short, unarmed junkie was no threat to anyone from way out there.
Locks clanked, and then the armored door popped open. Two figures in dark body armor rushed out. Their raised rifles and worried gazes focused on their fallen comrade and the wailing woman kneeling over him. They didn’t even see Jan, who dropped a metal doorstop in the rapidly closing door.
Jan slipped up behind the woman in the back and scythed his knife across her throat. Even as she collapsed Jan was behind the second man, cutting his throat with no more sound than a whisper. That man dropped as well.
Emiko stood and stepped over Jan’s first victim, narrowed gaze focused on the warehouse and its surroundings. Jan moved beside her as the two of them advanced on the almost closed door, propped open by Jan’s doorstop. Jan pulled the door open as Emiko slipped inside, into darkness. Except she could see.
Normally, cutting people’s throats in cold blood would bother Jan, but these people were Truthers. They had tortured and murdered many innocent Advanced civilians, people who had committed no other crime than visiting Ceto and trying to co-exist. Even so, these cold-blooded murders still bothered Jan — a little — which assured him he hadn’t turned into a sociopath while imprisoned on Tantalus. Good to know.
“Clear,” a robotic voice said over their ear-comms.
That would be Emiko, silently mouthing words that the attachments on all their throats converted to speech inside their ears. Kinsley never went anywhere without the best gear.
Jan held the door until a huffing Pollen lumbered in from the end of the street, where she’d kept watch through the scope of her tank-killer rifle. Her bulk and armor barely fit through the frame. Jan had asked her to bring a smaller weapon, but to be fair, asking Pollen to bring a small rifle was like asking a champion hoverbike racer to use a bicycle.
Kinsley emerged from around the corner and breezed in after Pollen, looking as relaxed as if she hadn’t just stepped over three bloody bodies. She still wore her formfitting body armor, but she’d added a dark-colored backpack. Jan stepped in last and locked the door, as Rafe wasn’t coming into the warehouse.
Rafe would stay outside to run their comms and hack the warehouse’s security system. Assuming it had a security system. Water stained the warehouse’s floors and walls, and dead bugs littered the floor, but at least the walls weren’t splattered with dried blood this time.
Jan soon spotted Emiko crouched against the wall inside the first corner, a needle pistol in her hands, with Kinsley behind her and Pollen behind them. Jan tapped Pollen on the shoulder.
She glanced at him. “What?” she mouthed.
Jan pointed at the giant rifle she now cradled in both hands. “You fire that, they’ll hear us two blocks over.” Like Emiko, he mouthed the words instead of speaking them.
Pollen frowned. “Also makes a decent club.” She mimed smacking someone with the stock. “See? Quiet.”
Jan decided not to argue the point. “We’re all locked up,” he informed everyone. “Go.”
Kinsley tapped Emiko on the shoulder, and Emiko silently crept out of sight. Kinsley followed. The hallway remained dark, but that was expected. Power came at a premium out here.
Pollen followed the other two women, and Jan followed after her. He hated being in the back, but Emiko and Kinsley had insisted he wasn’t stealthy enough, and also, they both had night vision. Jan didn’t have ultralight contacts or a PBA, and thus saw nothing but the vague outline of Pollen’s armored form.
“Contact,” Emiko’s robotic voice said in Jan’s ear. “Hold.”
Jan crouched beside Pollen. Moments later, a pop like an air-condenser sounded. Emiko added, “Clear,” and then they were off again. Soon Jan stepped over a slack-jawed corpse with a cluster of tiny metal stakes in his head: another Truther, taken down by the near-silent bolts from Emiko’s needle pistol.
Light crept up as Jan found Emiko pressed against another closed door with a single frosted window, Kinsley at her side. Flickering red illumination came from the other side of the door, suggesting the Truthers used old-fashioned barrel fires for light. Pollen crouched on the other side of the door.
“No alarms yet!” Rafe shouted over their ear-comms. “How’s things in there? Anyone shot yet?” Unlike the robotic voices from their gear, Rafe’s was loud and quite annoying.
“No,” Emiko mouthed. “What are we looking at?”
“No security system that I can find,” Rafe said. “They have a Spacenet terminal, but the computers they’re running are so old I could barely find any package they understand. They probably just use them for archiving and uploading.”
“Can you give us an estimate of their numbers?”
“Can’t get that either. These folks may be running fossils, but they were smart enough not to keep their cameras running. They probably only turn the cameras on when they’re filming a confession or, you know, about to shoot someone.”
“I am much smarter than Rafe,” Pollen informed everyone. She brought her big rifle up and pressed one eye to the scope. “Wi-Vi scope.” She closed her other eye and aimed her rifle at the thin interior w
all. “See? So useful.”
“We have those now?” Emiko mouthed.
“The Supremacy’s had those scopes for decades,” Kinsley explained. “We didn’t have them until recently.”
Pollen swept her rifle across the wall between them and the bad guys. “I count five inside. One sitting. Four standing, milling, and armed. And ...” She paused, which was unusual for Pollen. “Seven bodies on the floor.”
Jan exchanged glances with the others in the low light. “Did they have captives other than Bharat?”
Pollen shrugged. “May I shoot them now?”
“Not quite yet,” Jan said. “We need one to interrogate.”
Dying to the last was what Truthers did in gunfights, a legacy of the Supremacy’s well-known habit of torturing captives for information. Better off dead than captured had been the Patriots of Ceto’s motto, back when they were fighting to remove the Supremacy, and the Truthers were the most zealous of all Patriots. Also, random shooting might hit Bharat if he was in the warehouse and not, sadly, two meters under it.
Emiko extended an open palm and a closed fist. “Time for plan A, then.”
Jan grinned and did the same. They always roshambo’d about who got to bullshit the bad guys.
Two fists counted down in silence. Three, two, one, tie. Three, two, one, win. Jan beamed as he accepted Kinsley’s pack, and Emiko stuck her tongue out at him. He hated walking into a room full of guns, but he hated Emiko doing it a lot more.
Jan rummaged around the pack and pulled out a thick wool shirt, a battered graphene-plate jacket, and a smart-looking beret. He dressed up like a Patriot of Ceto because that was who he needed to be now if he didn’t want to get immediately shot. Low voices murmured beyond the wall as Jan donned his disguise.
“They’re milling,” Pollen mouthed, eye glued to her scope. “One of the people just sat down.”
Jan didn’t think about what that might mean. If Bharat was dead, Jan was dead, but he’d take the assholes who’d finished them both out before the torture nanos consumed him. These Truthers deserved worse for their dickish ways.
Pollen took a knee beside the wall, away from the door, and settled her big rifle’s bipod on a large hunk of biocrete. Kinsley took a position by the doorframe, readying a small dumb pistol with a big suppressor. Jan straightened his beret and took a breath. He glanced at Emiko, and this time, she didn’t smile. She watched him with real worry in her eyes.
Emiko still cared about him. She had never stopped caring about him. Jan pushed the door open and strode into the warehouse like he owned the place.
“Hey!” Jan shouted. “Who’s in charge of this shithole?” No one expected an intruder who’d just killed all your door guards to stroll in and demand an audience.
Four armed people, two men and two women, straightened in confusion as Jan marched into the cavernous and mostly empty warehouse. As Pollen had reported, Jan counted four freshly confused Truthers standing around a table with rifles, a fifth Truther with mirrored data glasses sitting at the table’s side, and seven bodies lined up on the bloodstained floor.
A quick survey of the dead’s attire assured Jan they had all been Truthers as well. There was no Bharat in here, and no other captives. Just a bunch of confused assholes with guns.
“Stop!” a bald soldier with an eyepatch demanded, pointing his rifle. Like the others, he wore dusty cargo pants, a thick armored vest, and a grimy gray shirt. It was the closest thing this particular cell of dickheads likely had for a uniform.
Jan glared at him. “Don’t point that thing at me!”
“Rifle down,” the man at the desk ordered. His nose twitched beneath his mirrored data glasses. “Identify yourself.”
“We don’t have time for this!” Jan gestured at the windows of the warehouse. “We have CSD inbound, five minutes. Grab what you need and move out now.”
“What?” a burly woman asked, shocked. “How’d they find us?” She almost had Pollen’s build, but was much shorter.
“Someone got sloppy,” Jan growled. “This is what happens when you nab targets from the Luxury District.” He glared at Eyepatch. “Or they simply heard all the fucking shooting.”
Two soldiers moved before Glasses stood. “Stop,” Glasses said.
Both soldiers stopped immediately. Not good. These soldiers obviously respected their commander, and their commander did not appear to be an idiot.
Glasses watched Jan from behind his mirrored lenses. “Tell us who you are and how you found us here, or we will shoot you.” A predatory smile grew as his soldiers raised their guns.
So much for bullshitting them into compliance. Jan rolled his eyes, raised his empty right hand, and made an unusually precise slicing motion at their leader. “Christ, am I the only—”
A bullet burst through Glasses’ data glasses and then right out the back of his head. Jan’s seemingly random gesture had been a command for Pollen to fire. The Truthers’ leader was too smart for Jan’s bullshit, but the other four Truthers weren’t, and now, they actually wanted everyone to hear the shot.
“Down, down, down!” Jan rushed for the table and past the shocked Truthers before they could decide to shoot him. He shoved the table over and cowered behind it, then looked around. “Get down, you idiots! We’ve got a sniper out there!”
Truthers dropped all around him, panicked at the sight of their slain commander. They had dropped facing the outer walls, because of course a sniper would snipe you from outside the warehouse, right? No one would snipe you from inside a building.
Jan idly noticed the table he’d pushed over already had two big bullet holes in it. There was probably a story behind that. He set curiosity aside, grabbed the rifle from the dead man with the broken data glasses, and fired over the table at the warehouse windows. He hit nothing and shattered glass.
“Back door’s clear!” he shouted. “Go, go, go!”
The Truthers, people who’d been drilled to follow orders from anyone sounding remotely confident, didn’t question the voice of command. All four hopped up and ran for the door Jan had entered by, yet Jan caught the man with the eyepatch by the shoulder and pulled him back down. “Wait!”
The man’s single good eye blinked at him. “But you said—”
Jan’s hand knifed into the other man’s neck hard enough to leave him choking, and then he dropped the gasping, gurgling man on his face. He pinned the man’s arms behind his back as another massive bang sounded. He looked up in time to see two of the three Truthers drop at almost the same time.
One of Pollen’s giant bullets had gone right through both of them. Jan imagined she was gleefully proud of that. She always had taken pleasure in lining up the perfect shot.
The last upright survivor stopped where she was, head turning from the door to Jan as her rifle came around. Her wide eyes shined with betrayal. Jan felt a stab of unexpected guilt before Kinsley stepped through the open door, behind the woman, and put her down with a single shot to the back of the head.
Emiko stepped through after Kinsley, eyes narrowed as she surveyed the carnage, and Pollen bumped the doorframe as she shouldered her way in behind both. Smoke trailed from her rifle. She had the biggest grin on her face.
Just like that, four of the Truthers who abducted Bharat and murdered other innocent Advanced were dead. Just like that, they had one live Truther to interrogate, one man left to lead them to whatever Truther group was holding Bharat. All in all—
Jan’s captive wriggled loose and socked him in the jaw.
Jan went down as Eyepatch grappled with him, punching and thrashing on top of him, but then both he and Eyepatch froze as a menacing rumble arose outside the warehouse. It sounded like the engine of some sort of massive vehicle fast approaching.
“Hey,” Eyepatch said, eyes wide, “isn’t that—?”
One wall of the warehouse exploded violently enough that Jan felt the shockwave half a warehouse away. Eyepatch rose and ran as a six-wheeled armored personnel carrier rolled th
rough the hole into the warehouse, its turreted top gun swiveling to face Jan. The dark brown monster bucked to a halt as Eyepatch made a break for it, and Jan had just enough time to dash behind a biocrete pillar before the APC’s turret opened fire.
Half the reinforced pillar disintegrated around him before the deafening hail of armor-piercing bullets stopped. “HALT,” a magnified voice ordered, “OR WE WILL USE LETHAL FORCE.”
The warning felt a tad late.
One shot from Pollen’s rifle wrecked both gun and turret. The APC’s turret didn’t shoot Jan’s column again. The big vehicle’s rumbling engine stopped rumbling after Pollen put several more deafening shots into it, howling with delight.
On the other side of the warehouse, Jan spotted Eyepatch fumbling with the outside door. Jan pulled a throwing knife, took a breath as his vision narrowed, and tossed. A moment later, his knife imbedded itself hilt deep in the back of Eyepatch’s neck. The man dropped dead.
“Told you!” a gleeful Pollen shouted, as Jan risked a peek around the savaged column. “Tank killer!
The Truther APC sat smoking and motionless. Then the whole thing burst into flames. Jan kept his eyes on the vehicle’s top hatch, ready to shoot anyone who popped out, but no one popped out. Pollen’s armor-piercing bullets must have ripped right through the vehicle’s occupants.
The APC bore no identifying markings, just dull brown paint and weathering, but it had certainly belonged to Ceto’s military at one time or another. You didn’t just buy APCs off the street.
So how had the Truthers gotten their hands on a surplus CSD military vehicle? The CSD were careless, but they were not that careless. Someone would have reported the APC missing.
The APC’s origin story was a mystery for later. The mystery, now, was how to get out of here without running into more Truthers. Jan rushed across the open space and slid into cover beside his crew.
“Pollen,” Jan said, “use your Wi-Vi scope on the floor. Truthers don’t stay anywhere without an escape tunnel.”
Supremacy's Outlaw: A Space Opera Thriller Series (Insurgency Saga Book 3) Page 11