Soldier

by David Ryker

  “First pass!” she yelled as we came upon the eighty-fifth floor.

  Greg and Mac leaned out of the back and sprayed the building with fire, shattering the windows as Volchec swung around for a second approach.

  “You got your ass strapped on, ‘cause this is going to be rough,” she yelled, swinging in low and taking us up in a vertical climb. I was crouched on Greg’s arm, and out of my peripheral I could see Fish loaded on Mac’s. Both Greg and Mac had one leg on the doorframe, holding on to the cargo netting on the wall to keep them in the ship as it hauled itself upward, engines screaming.

  “We’re only getting one shot at this — you ready?” she asked, the G-Force distorting her voice.

  I wasn’t sure if I was, but there was no backing out now. The ship tilted back, and the engines cut. We inverted, and the building sailed into view, slowing as we arced to the top of our climb and stopped. The eighty-fifth floor, windows blown out, loomed, and then I was flying. My stomach lurched as Greg propelled me into space, throwing me across the gap, a thousand meters above the street below.

  Fish and I hung, side by side, flying through the blisteringly cold air, and then we landed, hard. The momentum carried me over and I sprawled forward, rolling sideways and scrambling to a stance in the concrete corridor of the eighty-fifth floor, clawing air into my lungs. Fish never left his feet, landing and springing forward with ease.

  “We’ll keep them busy, just hurry the fuck up!” Volchec yelled, voice crackling with static as she dipped out of range and pulled away into the streets below, still tailed by three Fixed-wings. She was right, we had to move fast. I took one look at Fish, drew my pistol, and then started moving. Kera told us that her missing merc was a humanoid, though he wasn’t in a cell. The eighty-fifth was one of the accommodation floors for humanoid Guard, and housed a series of apartment-like dwellings. A lot of the Guard lived in the tower full-time, and their man was being held in apartment 85-C. All we needed to do was get him out. Fox had been holding him there to keep Kera’s crew on the straight and narrow. Insurance, Kera’d called it. I believed it. She said that Fox had been operating on Telmareen for the last year, setting up the operation and worming her way into the Guard. Kera’s part in it all was simple — she was to help Fox double down. She was doing her usual recruiting spiel, slowly turning whoever she could. Kera’s job was to put the word out about the skimming — leak the news so other mercs started showing up. Get them to try to knock over a transport with the promise of credits and more work for whoever was pulling the strings to come after. The Guard would scramble to protect it, put down the would-be thieves and then keep the heist quiet. All the while, shit is blowing up and bullets are flying — lockdowns are in effect and martial law is imposed and lifted continually while they’re looking for the idiots who hit the transports. For all those living on Telmareen, the Federation, who were supposed to bring peace and order — for a cut of their taxes, of course — weren’t delivering on what they promised. And with the Guard being forced to worked harder, pushed to do more by the Federation, to stop the attacks and crush those trying to upset the balance, it was becoming easier and easier to turn them. When Fox had enough support, she intended to lead an uprising, and brief though it might have been, it would have lasted long enough to make off with a freighter-full of Iskcara, which was always the goal. It was the long game, and it was her specialty. I believed that, rolling Kera’s words over in my mind as we hit each corner in turn, covering the other as we worked our way toward 85-C.

  Supposedly though, a week back, Fox had received word that there was some big upset at a Free stronghold halfway across the galaxy, and she was needed to oversee things there. She slipped off planet, and then turned up a couple days later limping, which made sense considering I’d shot her — or so Kera said her guy had relayed. She was using the Telmareen Guard Tower as her base of operations — I mean who the hell would look there for a Federation war criminal — let alone a dead one. Kera spat all this information out, and neither me nor Mac, at the bar, had said a word. It all fit though. If it was a week back, that would have been Draven — the Falmouth coming down. If she was called in to oversee things there, it must have been to clean up the mess caused by whoever the hell decided to attack a Federation carrier as it passed by. It was probably her plan all along to lure the Federation to attack the base, and it’d almost come off. I was kicking myself I’d let her go… twice. She hadn’t been detained on Draven, like she’d said. She was commanding the counter attack, saw it going south, maybe thought that a full battalion of mech were incoming — and she knew she was more valuable alive and that the battle was lost. She was getting the hell out of there before she was caught — or worse, identified. And she’d played me like a god damn violin, and I’d fallen for it. How the hell she’d managed to get there and back in a day was beyond reasoning, and was the only thing that didn’t fit — but everything else made so much sense. It’d taken us nearly four days in hyperdrive to get from the Oberon Mansoon to Telmareen, and it was only the biggest ships that had the sort of power it took to warp space and create a wormhole — she’d have needed her own destroyer — and whether she was well connected or not, there was no hiding one of those, so it remained a mystery to me. Of course I couldn’t exactly say to Volchec or the others that it didn’t make sense — because I still hadn’t come clean about seeing her, so I stayed quiet instead and hoped that someone would put a bullet between her eyes before any of it came out. Though knowing my luck, I didn’t think that was likely to happen. Still, I had bigger things to worry about. If we didn’t get Kera’s man out, she was going to spill everything to the Federation — about how we’d hit the transport and basically fucked everything up. It was more than enough to get us all ejected, and none of us wanted that. Our only out was to rescue her man from the tower — where Kera said he was under the protection of the corrupted Guard, so we didn’t exactly know what we were walking into. Still, if it was on this floor, built for humanoids, it meant that they’d be our size, which was something at least.

  My satchel jostled as we made for 85-C, the floor empty. Seemed like everyone else had scrambled to the lower floors and Mac’s scrambler was still making it difficult for them to coordinate, though there was no way they hadn’t seen our Tilt-wing hit the eighty-fifth floor, so it wouldn’t leave us long before they came back up.

  We circled around until it loomed in front of us, a solid metal slab in a concrete wall, the letters 85-C stenciled on it in black. I slowed to a halt, breathing hard, and swung the satchel around, opening it. I pulled a shape charge out and slammed it against the metal just under the handle.

  Fish reached out, twisted the dial and armed it, and then we both made for the corner. The timer hit zero and the bang echoed through the halls. With my ears ringing, we swam through the smoke toward the maimed frame, and then dipped in, pistols raised, ready to take on whatever lay ahead.

  24

  There are certain moments in life where you see things with perfect clarity — where everything slows down and you’ve got all the time in the world to think. When everything goes right, and it’s like there’s a higher power working through you, guiding your hand.

  When we burst through the door of apartment 85-C, it wasn’t like that at all. I went low and Fish went high, but as we swung our pistols around the room, ready and willing to put bullets in whatever was waiting there for us, there was nothing to shoot at.

  The room was completely empty.

  We stared at the modest couch strewn with dirty clothes, the kitchenette with a sink full of dishes, the ajar bedroom door that Fish went to check, leading to an unmade bed and moldy shower. There was no sign of whoever had been there — Kera’s man was gone, as were the guards watching him. It all looked fresh though, and the scent of stale sweat and gun grease hung in the air. We couldn’t have missed them by much, but we had missed them. Whoever had been there was now gone.

  Fish came back out and stared at me. “What…. now?�
�� His voice was strained and his eyes were bulging, gills flickering as he took short, sharp breaths. I think it was the first time I’d ever seen him rattled.

  I narrowed my eyes and looked around, mind reeling, knuckles white around my pistol. “I don’t even know.”

  We followed through with the plan and headed upward. It was all we could do. It wasn’t far to the roof, and we were prepared to fight our way up if we needed to — it’s what we’d planned on, but just like the eighty-fifth, it was completely empty. If the upper floors had been commandeered by the Free, they were gone now, and there was no sign of anyone. The only noise as we climbed was our heavy breaths and boots echoing on the steps of the central stairwell. By the time we got there, Mac and Greg had taken out two more of the Fixed-wings on their ass, and the third had backed off to a distance where it couldn’t be shot down.

  We waved them in and Volchec slid the ass across the landing pad on the roof like a pro, just long enough for us to hop in, and then we were out of there. The ramp closed up behind us and the pressure sucked on my ears, and then Volchec took us upward through the clouds and out of range of the Fixed-wing on our six, and into orbit. She swung us around to the dark side of the planet, out of range of anyone pursuing us, and came out of the cockpit, face twisted. She stopped at the rail and stared down at me, breathing hard. I was on one of the benches in the hold, head in my hands.

  “What happened?” she called down from the catwalk.

  I didn’t look up, and though I wanted to offer something encouraging, or even constructive, only one thing came to mind, and to my lips. “We fucked up — that’s what happened.”

  I heard her fist hit the steel rail, and then the cockpit door closed behind her. I stared up at Greg, chipped, dinged, and dented from the fight, and then thought of Alice, jaw broken as well as God knows what else, and wondered what it was all for. We’d accomplished absolutely nothing, and caused a fuck-ton of trouble in the process.

  And now, with nothing but a name to go on — Kat Fox — and a couple of mercs hovering the axe over our necks, we were pretty much screwed. I closed my eyes and tried to calm myself.

  “James?” came Greg’s voice in the gloom.

  “Yeah, Greg?” I muttered, not opening my eyes.

  “I detect that you are stressed. Would you like me to play some music for you?”

  I gritted my teeth and tried not to tell him to go fuck himself. I settled instead for saying, “No.”

  But he didn’t listen, and as we drifted through space on the dark side of Telmareen, all the sad notes of a usually happy song seemed to ring in the hull. No one said anything, though. No one had the energy to.

  I just pushed my head back and let the exhaustion catch up with me. At some point, it reached out and took me, dragging me down into the murky depths of my own mind.

  I dreamt that I was choking — and when I woke up, I quickly realized that things weren’t much better. It was a new day, but unfortunately, it appeared just to be the same old shit. Nothing had changed, and though I wanted it to be more than anything else, it hadn’t been a bad dream. We were hanging by a thread, and it seemed like any way we went, we’d be heading toward our own deaths. I opened my hands and stared at them.

  No, there had to be something we could do. Some way out of all this. I set my teeth and thought hard. I thought like I hadn’t done before. I thought like the sort of pilot that I’d eventually grow to become.

  And as a thought began to grip me, mutating slowly into an idea, my hands started to curl into fists. I realized that this was a problem that had an answer. There was a way out. It wasn’t pretty but it was there. I swallowed and stood up, staring at Greg. “Hey big guy,” I said, a hint of malice in my voice. “You ready for the next round?”

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