To get a good look, Branco was standing a short way back from Sun and his squad. A team of caterers armed with drink trays took up position on the terrace, waiting for the signal to serve. One jerk stood directly in front of him, blocking his view. Man, what was it with these buffoons in their stupid mustard waistcoats? If this was Keiko and Gjalp’s idea of a prank to bribe the caterers to…to…
They’ve taken up position.
He flicked a glance in Captain Blue’s direction and saw the caterers who’d pushed past him earlier were now in position near her.
Waiting.
Ready.
A perspective shift rippled through Branco’s head. Instead of waiters politely receding into the background while their clients enjoyed the party spectacle, he now saw a ring of hostiles around each sister. And the two he remembered seeing behind him on the upper terrace level were in perfect overwatch position.
Paranoia on his part or hostile intent on theirs?
Branco made a split-second decision and acted.
He opened the cooler.
Stilling his heart and controlling his expression as effectively as the greatest actor, Branco withdrew the captain’s pair of champagne bottles and turned innocently.
Sure enough, one of the caterers was standing behind him, glaring down from the low wall bordering the next terrace level.
“I forgot the captain’s bubbles,” said Branco holding up the bottles shamefacedly. “Should’ve left the drink to you pros, eh?”
“Yes, go do it now,” said the man, smiling almost convincingly.
Branco turned back nonchalantly to face the ring closing in on Sun. Then his muscles kicked into violent action. With the overwatch caterer’s eyes drilling wound channels into his back, he took one long stride forward and spun, swinging the base of a heavy bottle at the man still blocking his view of the Raknar. It cracked open the base of his skull.
Without missing a beat, Branco continued his spin and flung the second bottle up at the man who’d smiled at him moments earlier.
A man now drawing a pistol on him.
* * * * *
Chapter 2
The gun went off at the same time as the bottle cracked against the second assassin’s skull. Branco had already backflipped and rolled sideways, but he needn’t have bothered. The shot went wild (low velocity, he noted, unconventional load), and by the time Branco had scrambled up to his position and grabbed the man’s gun, it was obvious he’d never get up again.
He took a moment to scan his gaze over a party in turmoil.
For a moment, he panicked when he couldn’t see the other assailant on overwatch. A scream from the barbecue patio revealed him to be in the clutches of Lieutenant Flkk’Sss, who was holding the intruder’s head over a sizzling grate, while the SleSha slammed down the barbecue lid. Nasty.
But the infiltrators had grabbed the captain.
And Sun.
While two of the attackers were waving stubby plastic pistols at the furious mercs of Shock and Vengeance Squads, what really kept them at bay was a third intruder. This bear of a man had one arm locked around Sun’s neck, and the other hand held a gun to her temple. Her dangling boots kicked the air helplessly.
Put Sun in a CASPer, and she was a ruthlessly effective killer, with endurance matched by few Midnighters, but Branco knew from those secret moments when he’d held her in his arms that the major only weighed about 110 pounds. At the closest quarters she was vulnerable, and didn’t she know it!
She’d never escape that headlock.
Time to even the score.
“Drop the gun,” shouted Sun’s captor at Branco, ramming the muzzle of his pistol into her head and making her gasp. “We walk out of here with your captain’s slate and those junk ancient mecha, and you get your two commanders back unharmed.”
Branco dropped his pistol, but flung out his arm to jab a finger at the hostile holding Sun. “If you hurt one hair on her head…” he threatened, but it was obvious to everyone that his threats were hollow. Even if he chanced rushing Sun’s attacker, Branco was a good ten feet away and now unarmed.
At least, that was the way he hoped the hostiles saw it. None of the attackers decided Branco was yet deserving of what he guessed was a very limited supply of rounds.
It proved a fatal mistake.
The dart Branco had secretly thrown when he’d pointed his finger was not quite invisible but was as close as the Binnig techs could make. Officially, he had no idea how equipment issued by his former employer could still be on his person. Nonetheless, a few items had begged to be liberated, and he usually carried a few tricks up his sleeves – literally in the case of the invisible dart.
Sun’s captor only saw the pointing man, not the weapon he’d thrown.
But he did feel the tip pierce his temple and pump its payload of specialist nanites and nerve poison directly into his cerebral artery.
He shrieked in terror, but the terror rapidly twisted into anger. If he was gonna go, he’d blow this bitch’s brains out first.
He pulled the trigger.
Too late. The nanites had raced ahead of the poison to block nerve impulses to hands and feet. The message to fire never reached his trigger finger.
And then the nerve agent began to wreak its devastating attack.
As spasms began to claim him, Sun squirmed free.
For a stretched moment amid the mayhem, she transfixed Branco with a look from her dark eyes that sparkled like black sapphires.
What meaning lay behind it? Gratitude? Hunger? His imagination?
Then she was running, dodging around the attacker lunging for her, and carrying on toward the fountain patio where her sister was still a hostage.
Behind her, Shock and Vengeance Squads rushed the two surviving hostiles on the terrace, led by Tatterjee on top of his Tortantula. The eight squads of 1st Company were storming up the hillside just behind.
Branco ignored them and ran after Sun.
As he passed, a pistol shot hit the Tortantula in her relatively soft underbelly, and she shuddered to a halt. Branco looked around in surprise at the Vengeance Squad monster whom Tatterjee had renamed Betty.
Had the round been poisoned? To his experienced eyes and ears, the hostiles had smuggled harmless plastic through what was supposed to be tight base security and assembled them into guns and pellets on-site. That’s how Branco would do it – probably with a binary chemical propellant that was harmless until combined with urea. Not something that could kill a Tortantula.
“Where’d the bullet go?” Betty asked, dipping her head to look beneath her abdomen.
The hostiles hadn’t been the only ones to smuggle weapons into the party. Tatterjee had a hypervelocity pistol in his little hands. Branco pressed on as the Flatar put four rounds through the men who’d upset his partner.
Sun leaped onto the terrace wall, swaying slightly to keep her balance.
Over at the fountain, Branco saw an impasse. Two of the intruders sprawled lifelessly over the polished stone, but one had grabbed the control slate, and one had a CL-32 Peacemaker, with which he kept at bay Commander Venix, Lieutenant Flkk’Sss, and a group of SleSha armed with tongs, spatulas, and long-handled toasting forks. A final intruder was dangling Captain Blue in a headlock, a gun to her head in the same M.O. as with her sister and telling a hundred angry Midnighter mercs to keep their distance.
Without their overwatch, they didn’t have the eyes to see Sun drawing throwing knives out of those heavy boots she always wore. “Surrender!” she cried, but before she even uttered the words, she’d already pitched two steel blades in overarm throws.
The merc keeping the angry cooks at bay wasn’t about to take his eye off the aliens just because a little girl was shouting threats.
Then he heard the bodies crashing to the ground behind him after Sun’s throwing knives buried themselves in the necks of his comrades.
“Angler?” he called. “You okay? Sergeant?”
His only answer was a gu
rgling rattle from the throat of the man who’d dared to pull a gun on Sun’s sister.
Over the course of about a second, Branco could see the realization write itself in the merc’s slumping shoulders: this contract is never gonna pay out. The last hostile carefully lowered his gun and raised his hands. A second later he was slammed to the stone floor beneath an angry MinSha.
Blue waved the alien off her attacker.
The half-stunned prisoner tried to sit up, but Blue kicked him in the throat and stomped him back down.
From his position on the wall beside Sun, Branco got an unobstructed view of the captain. Years ago, faulty nanites had stripped away most of the pigmentation from her skin, and all her hair but for a dark blue topknot. Now her face became a terrifying visage of demonic anger, as her face flushed with angry channels of red that pulsed over every inch of skin.
“Why?” she demanded in a whisper.
“The – the – Raknar,” choked the prisoner.
His reply only fueled the captain’s inhuman anger. She grabbed a skewer from one of the SleSha cooks and – without breaking her hold on the prisoner’s gaze – casually pierced his thigh.
“Why?” she repeated.
“Raknar. Ahh! Everyone wants the entropy-cursed things. That’s all I know.”
Blue smiled and leaned in toward the man’s face, putting her weight onto the skewer. “Why?” she repeated as its point pressed all the way through his leg, releasing a scream that sent the waiting seabirds flapping away to the shore.
“I…I don’t know why. Please! Ahh! Whole galaxy’s gone mad. Ever since the Merc Guild pulled that stunt on Earth. No! Stop it! Please! Direct Guild employment. I only signed up to look good to Peepo. It was an acquisition contract.”
The red tracery ebbed from Blue’s pallid skin. “Well, you didn’t get to acquire them, did you?” she pointed out in a honeyed voice. “Better luck next time, sweetie.” She braced a foot on the man’s wounded thigh and pulled out the skewer, letting the bloodied spike clatter to the floor.
“Venix!” she called over the man’s screams. “Party’s over for you, I’m afraid. Secure this piece of sputum and any others who still live. And will someone please stop him bleeding all over the patio? I want to know everything you can extract about their client and their purpose. No going soft on him now, Commander.”
As if a Zuparti would ever go soft! Branco pitied the prisoner as Commander Venix took him away with a couple of staff officers. The captain’s anger was a thunderbolt of intensity that soon passed, but Venix made a more terrifying captor. The weasel-like humanoids were no more sadistic than the next species, but they were driven by paranoia. How had these mercs infiltrated the base’s defenses? Who were they? When would the next attack come? Venix wouldn’t so much as twitch his whiskers at the prospect of pulling out a tongue or trapping a vulnerable body extremity in a slowly tightening vice if it produced a single nugget of information.
The merc moaned as he was dragged away, before being persuaded into silence by the MinSha’s blows.
“Who the hell are those mercs?” whispered Sun under her breath.
Good question.
Branco and the major looked at each other…then raced back to the bodies of the attackers on the terrace.
Branco ripped open a mustard waistcoat and lifted the shirt underneath. Beside him, Sun did the same. You could learn a lot from a merc’s ink – or lack of it.
“Are we gonna eat him?” asked Betty hopefully.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” said Tatterjee. “You know humans. She’s probably going to hump it.”
“Yes, but do we eat the bodies after?”
“That’s enough!” snapped Sun.
“What was that, Major?” said Tatterjee. “Thank you for saving my life?”
Sun glared at the Flatar. “You disobeyed an order. Firearms and alcohol are a combustible mix. That’s why you were forbidden your pistol.”
“Sorry, ma’am.”
“White dove,” said Branco, winking at Tatterjee. “High on the left breast, just below the collar bone.”
“Same here,” Sun confirmed. “That other fool said he was working directly for the guild, which I’ve never heard of before. But these two are Condottieri.”
Condottieri? Branco knew of them, but why were they here? The mercenary company was owned and operated by Nicolo SantoPietro, a veteran who styled himself Il Colombo or the Dove. The Condottieri’s registered base was in Milan, and they had a training facility in Sicily, but most of their operations were in the rich, coreward systems of the Praf and Centauri sectors. They weren’t well known on Earth, but when he’d worked for Binnig – the manufacturer of the Combat Assault System, Personal – he’d seen the manifests for their CASPer suit shipments. They were big numbers.
“Are you sure you released control to me?”
It was the captain, who was ambling toward them while talking into her slate. Only a minute earlier, her demonic face had blazed with anger while she’d tortured one of her kidnappers. Now she appeared to be without a care in the world, a beautiful woman chatting to her friend in this lovely outdoor setting.
“I’m sure,” came Gloriana’s reply out of the device in Blue’s hands. “The Raknars should be running from your slate.”
Forgotten while the attack was underway, the Raknars had continued their shuffling advance until they were almost at the base of the hillside. Those monsters must weigh a thousand tons apiece. If they didn’t stop, they would crash into the hill with the momentum of a destroyer at ramming speed.
Blue’s smooth and hairless face creased into a puzzled frown as she tapped away at her slate. “Negative, Gloriana. I do not have control. I repeat, I do not—”
The Raknars stomped their massive feet and came to a halt in craters they punched out of the ground. From its position directly in front of the stone arch, the lead mecha slowly raised an arm.
“—have control,” Blue finished. “I didn’t do that.”
“Well,” said Gloriana. “Who did?”
A boom hit the hillside as a magnetically accelerated shell left the muzzle of a heavy coilgun strapped to the Raknar’s wrist, passing high over the hill.
* * * * *
Chapter 3
“Everyone, seek cover!” ordered Major Sun as alarms wailed. “Base defense, report!”
The Raknar clumsily lowered its arm to aim at the scattering mercenaries.
The alarms died.
“Captain Blue!” boomed the Raknar.
“Comms are down,” shouted the voice of Captain Finn-Holt from somewhere within the mass of his 1st Company command. “Base defense compromised. We think that monster’s housing a full cyber assault team, but we’re beating them back.”
Captain Blue shouted at the Raknar. “Identify yourself!”
Without waiting for an answer, she bounded down the graveled steps and scrambled up the huge arch at the base of the hill. Her feet found good purchase on the bas relief carvings of tentacled monsters wreaking destruction upon their hapless victims. From the apex of the arch, she stuck her hands on her hips and stood resolute against the metal monster.
Thirty feet above Blue’s elevated position, the giant machine pivoted its headless torso as if staring down at her.
“There you are,” said the Raknar through the speakers it wore like a necklace. “Compliments of Sinclair’s Scorpions, Blue. We don’t like stealing from you, hen, but…ach, this goes against the grain, but there are dark times when even a mercenary can be driven by something more than the profit motive. And these are dark days indeed.”
“How noble. And how exactly do you expect to walk away with those crudely animated museum artifacts? You do realize that at this moment you are fulfilling the wildest fantasies of everyone with a targeting reticle, all over this facility?”
“Come after us, and we’ll destroy you and the Raknars. I know which of those outcomes your boss will detest most.”
These Scorpions had gu
ts; Branco had to hand them that. Everything hinged on the guess that Gloriana would order her mercenaries to stand down. Already, half of 1st Company had slid away to arm up, and the base had defenses about which he’d only heard dark rumors.
Blue allowed a long silence to mock the arrogance of the Scorpions before she responded. “Tell you what, Charlie – that is you, isn’t it? Charlie Sinclair?”
“That ancient article?” Branco felt sure the Raknar would shrug if it possessed shoulders. “We might be distantly related.”
Blue laughed. “I know the Scorpions of old. You must be Charlie’s younger brother, James.”
“What if I am?”
Blue’s fists clenched. Her body slid toward a combat stance, as if she were about to jump off the arch and punch the Raknar in its guts. Maybe she would. Blue was capable of anything. “I don’t react well to having assassins gatecrash my party and put a gun to my head, James Sinclair.”
“Those hooligans in the mustard waistcoats had nothing to do with us, Blue. Sinclair’s Scorpions don’t need help.”
“I see.” Blue relaxed. “Well, let’s discover if you’re as much fun to play with as your older brother. I’ll count to 100. If you and your team have gotten away with the Raknar by then – and without putting a scratch on them – I’ll come after you and take them back nicely.”
“You and whose army? Wait? You mean that rabble of blootered rejects, numpties and posers? You’re not in a proper Earth unit now, Blue. You’re just a tidy exhibit in an alien display case. And that’s why you’re talking pish. Your boss won’t let you open fire on her collectibles, and you know it.”
Blue crossed her arms defiantly, tapping a foot on the stonework of the arch. “100…99…Charlie’s brother or no, if I catch you on my planet, I will kill you. 98…”
“You’re unhinged,” said Sinclair, “just like Charlie said.”
Lieutenant Flkk’Sss gave keening whistles that Branco’s pendant translated as, “Defenses coming online.”
A cacophony of whining motors emanated from the arch. Before his astonished eyes, the bas relief monsters on its exterior erupted from their confinement, flailing tentacles through a cloud of dust and stone chips. For a moment he thought he was witnessing living alien warriors emerge – perhaps Gloriana herself was one of these many-tentacled nightmares – then he saw they were weapons turrets, and the tentacles straightened themselves into barrels. Further weaponry emerged from walls and ornamental stonework throughout the hillside. And all this firepower was aimed at the Raknar.
The Midnight Sun (The Omega War Book 2) Page 2