by Logan Jacobs
“What do we do now?” the green-eyed brunette asked from behind me.
“Well, princess,” I whistled. “Now we see if I packed enough of that asshole’s ammo.”
“But I-- they’re still my father’s soldiers, so I don’t--”
“Alright, listen close,” I explained, “either you shoot them, or they shoot you. They’re not gonna thank you for your mercy, because they’ll have already shot you. You’ll be dead. Kaput. Gone. Kicked off. Okay? It’s them or you, and if that doesn’t help you decide, just remember that it’s also them or me.”
Orla nodded and put her finger on the trigger of her shotgun. Her green eyes narrowed as she studied the troops below, and I remembered the way she’d stormed into the main hold of the Skyhawk with her shotgun at the ready. The princess might have been soft, but she had fire in her blood too.
We were low against the fire escape, so at first the troops didn’t see us. I was lucky, but apparently not lucky enough to escape their notice completely. One of the assholes pointed up at us excitedly.
I flipped the cap off another flare and launched it into the air. As it plunged down toward the soldiers, I fired a laser round into the middle of the flare. It burst apart in a shower of red sparks that fell like rain onto the Dominion troops.
“Now!” I shouted at Orla.
We both started shooting. I didn’t have much of a plan beyond that. The dead end had been an unexpected hiccup, but I didn’t blame Honey Bee for it. From the looks of the rubble at the end of the alley, it hadn’t always been a dead end. It must have collapsed in a recent firefight.
Given the state of the rest of the city, I wouldn’t have been surprised that red and navy forces had changed even the structure of the streets in all their efforts to steal control of the city from the other force.
I went through two magazines before I even took a breath. Orla’s shots came slower, but they all hit their targets. But it didn’t matter how many of them we shot because more just spilled into the street to fill in the gaps. If there had been any doubt that we were in the Dominion-controlled section of the city, there sure as shit wasn’t now.
Our only advantage was our position. We had the high ground, for one thing, and our bodies were also more or less protected by the metal of the fire escape. Orla was a little more exposed because she had to hang her shotgun over the side of the fire escape to hit her targets, but I just pulled her backward every time she had to reload to keep her under cover.
We did better than I thought, but we had already used up more ammunition than I would have liked. There was more on the Skyhawk, of course, but from our position in the alley, the ship might as well have been half a world away.
“Cover me,” I told Orla.
I handed her one of my sidearms so that she could shoot from a more covered position. The brunette shot another shotgun round into the crowd below and then crawled backward to take cover as a hail of bullets from below pinged against the fire escape beneath us. The princess switched to the handgun.
As Orla returned fire, I glanced up at the window of the rubbled building we were pinned against. With the top part of the fire escape blasted off, there was no good way into the window, but if I got a bit of a running start, I might be able to vault myself up to it.
I looked back at Orla. It would have been easier to just toss her up through the window and let her help me up, but that would mean neither of us would have cover fire for a few seconds, and that seemed like a very bad plan. I grabbed the shotgun and slung it by its harness over my back.
“Just keep shooting until I say the word,” I shouted over the rain of bullets. “I’m going up, and then I’ll reach down and grab you.”
Orla stopped shooting to look at me. She shook her head, and I saw the fear in her green eyes.
“Don’t leave me,” the brunette pleaded.
“I’m not gonna leave you,” I sighed. “If I’d been going to, don’t you think I would’ve already done that?”
The princess nodded, but she still didn’t look convinced.
“Just keep shooting,” I ordered. I didn’t have time to hold her hand through this.
“I’ll try,” she answered, with a little tremble of her lip.
“Just do it,” I said and rolled my eyes behind my glasses.
As soon as she started shooting again, I crawled away to the corner of the fire escape platform and calculated my jump.
“We can do it,” Honey Bee chimed calmly.
“I’m loving the confidence,” I muttered.
But then there was no more time for calculations. As soon as Honey Bee showed me the best spot to jump from, I sprang up from my position, took two big strides forward, and leaped as high as I could toward the window above us. My hand caught the ledge at an angle, and I swung myself just right so my body wouldn’t slam into the wall after me.
As I pulled myself up with one arm, bullets from the Dominion soldiers below collided with the wall on both sides of my body. I swayed my torso back and forth enough so I wasn’t a fixed target, and in a matter of seconds, I had successfully hauled myself through the window.
“Toss me the gun!” I yelled at Orla.
The princess threw me the sidearm, and I fired off a few more well-placed rounds before I holstered the weapon. I reached both arms down over the window ledge.
“Jump!” I shouted.
The princess twisted and hurled herself into the air in one fluid movement. I caught her hands and pulled her up through the window, and she collapsed on top of me as bullets pattered against the rough stone of the building outside. The brunette pushed herself up off me, but I thought she took a little longer than she had to considering there were bullets flying all around us.
“All in one piece, sweetness?” I asked.
She nodded and tucked a loose strand of dark brown hair back behind her ear.
Honey Bee clicked a warning just as someone cleared their throat in the room behind us. Immediately, I rolled to my feet and came up with my gun pointed at the source of the noise.
It was a middle-aged woman holding a baby in her arms. I lowered my pistol, and two children under the age of twelve came out from behind a couch in the room. We had stumbled into someone’s home, and from the looks of it, they were no strangers to a little firefight outside their window.
“Apologies for interrupting your morning,” I told the woman. “We’ll just be on our way.”
The woman didn’t understand me, so I let Orla translate for me. The woman shook her head and gestured with her free hand as she answered.
“She says it’s not safe to go out,” the princess translated. “But that we’re obviously very brave people to stand up to the Dominion. So she’ll help us.”
I narrowed my eyes. It sounded nice, but I still didn’t trust it. If this woman was just your average citizen, she wouldn’t be too keen on either the Dominion or the ULA, since they were both responsible for tearing apart the city. And she certainly wouldn’t be eager to put herself or her family in danger by helping us.
“Her son is in the ULA,” Orla translated the woman’s next words. “No, I’m sorry. He was. They killed him a few months ago. Executed him, I think.”
The word the woman had used was worse than just executed, but I didn’t want to tell Orla what Honey Bee’s translation of the term was. That explained the woman’s willingness to help us escape the Dominion, at least.
“We don’t want to bring trouble on your family,” I said, and the princess translated.
The woman shook her head and gestured for us to follow her. The rain of gunfire had ceased outside, and I knew that meant the soldiers would flood the inside of this building at any minute. The only reason they hadn’t already was probably because they didn’t know if the inhabitants of the building were ULA sympathizers who were just as likely to shoot them as help them.
When the gunfire didn’t start up again, the mother handed her baby to one of the other children, and she pulled back a threadba
re rug in the kitchen. I didn’t see anything at first, but my chip highlighted the portion of the floor that was a slightly different color than the surrounding stones. The woman pressed a button beside the stove, and the floor underneath the rug retracted to reveal a hidden passage.
She pointed and made a motion to hurry.
I helped Orla down into the passage, and then I reached in my vest, grabbed a fistful of the money I’d earned from the theft of the Alfaromero-31, and pressed it into the woman’s hands. She shook her head, so I just closed her fingers around it and held them shut.
She closed her eyes and nodded, and I saw that tears began to pour down her cheek.
As soon as the woman accepted the money, I hopped down beside Orla and gave a little wave. The woman shut the trap door, and we were left in complete darkness.
“She said to follow this until we came to a fork, and then go left,” Orla whispered. “That should bring us to a ULA-controlled zone.”
“I guess that’s better than no plan,” I muttered. “Come on.”
“How can you still have your sunglasses on?” the princess murmured. “I can’t see anything.”
“Exactly,” I answered. “If we can’t see anything without sunglasses, then what’s the point of taking them off?”
“Because it’s what normal people do,” she pouted.
“Well, sweetheart,” I sighed, “you should know by now that I sure as shit ain’t normal.”
Sometimes, I forgot that my chip made me see things that other people couldn’t. Sure, that also meant my eyes were all creepy and silver like little full moons, with no irises or pupils to speak of, but it also meant I could see decently in the dark. Better than a normal human, anyway.
“Just stay close to me,” I told her.
The brunette took my words to heart because two seconds later, I felt her hand slip into mine. I rolled my eyes but started forward into the darkness. The passage sloped sharply downward, and we had to take our time so we didn’t just tumble forward in a heap.
I didn’t like this kind of darkness. It felt too much like a cave or a cocoon, and I was too aware of how easy it would be for the Dominion to bomb this building and collapse the passage on top of us. But we pressed forward, and Honey Bee gave an occasional chime to reassure me that we weren’t headed for a dead end.
It took less time than I thought to reach the fork in the passage. We had traveled at such a steep angle down that I figured we had to be underground at this point, and I felt my lip curl. I wondered if the princess was also thinking about the possibility of a whole building and the ground itself caving in on top of us. When we reached the fork and started to the left, I was pleased to see that the passage leveled out.
After the next bend in the tunnel, I saw a faint light up ahead, and the passage started to slope back up, so I stopped and dropped the brunette’s hand.
“What are you--”
“Quiet,” I told her.
In case the rebels decided to be less than friendly to one of their newest recruits, I didn’t want to be caught off guard, so I reloaded both my projectile guns and checked that the laser gun at my ankle was fully charged. I reloaded the shotgun and handed the weapon back to the princess. I still had a couple flares left in my pack, plus the machete and my hunting knife, so all in all, I felt pretty prepared for whatever waited for us in the light ahead.
“We did also fight off a company of Dominion soldiers,” Honey Bee reminded me.
“I bet that made you happy, didn’t it?” I muttered. The Dominion rose to power when the galaxy united to fight against the Vespidae some hundred years ago.
“We are happy, yes,” my chip chimed. “Thank you.”
“I’m happy about what, exactly?” Orla asked.
“To be headed to your beloved rebels,” I answered.
It didn’t matter that my words hadn’t been for her. It was much easier to pretend they were than to explain that I had an alien chip implanted in my brain that read my every thought, enchanted all my abilities, and also wanted me to return to the hive so we could conquer and enslave the universe.
“We love you, Trevor,” Honey Bee cooed, and her voice started to echo in my mind again. “We love all life. All should join us. You were our chosen one. Why did you leave? Come back. Come back. Come back.”
“Um,” the princess said, “yes, I guess I am. I mean, of course I am.”
“Mhm,” I replied as I shook my head to clear Honey Bee’s echoing words.
I took the princess’ hand again so she wouldn’t trip on the way out of the tunnels, and then we headed toward the light. I left my guns in their holsters, but I knew I could get them out in a hurry if I had to. The light was projected onto the ground from a thin crack above us instead of in front us. That had to mean we were still underground.
“Not for long,” I growled.
The last thing I wanted was to open a secret door on a room full of guns pointed at us. So I just reached up and knocked as loudly and politely as I could.
Of course, I still got a gun to the face when the door opened away from the hole, but it was only one. That had to mean my luck was on the mend for the day.
“Hi there,” I told the red-coated man who had opened the trap door. “We’re the ones that left that little Dominion district back there in an uproar.”
He tilted his head to the side but still didn’t lower his gun.
“Oh, and drugs!” I grinned. “We’ve got loads of drugs.”
The red-coated man laughed and put away his weapon.
“Do you think he understood you?” Orla whispered.
“Yes, yes,” the ULA fighter insisted. “I understand.”
He held his hand down and pulled us both up into a small storage room. Crates were stacked around us haphazardly, but a few of them had their lids off. Inside them, I saw scattered meal replacement bars of various flavors and enough explosives to collapse all the tunnels they might have hidden under the city.
Clearly, they weren’t hurting for ammunition.
“I’m, uh, Leon,” I lied. “And this is Lora. We’re big fans of what you got going on here.”
The princess glanced at me when I gave the false names, but she didn’t correct me. Maybe that meant she was learning. Leon had already made a splash on Orpheus, and since I didn’t know exactly how everything would go with the rebels, I figured he may as well get the credit until I wanted to take it over. And damn nobody needed to know that this was Princess Orla Medalla. It was better to save that card for when we were more in control of our surroundings.
“Jax,” the red-coated man said. “Nice to meet anybody sympathetic to the cause.”
“Nice to meet you, Jax,” I responded. “So you just decide to trust us, just like that?”
“Well, you came through the tunnels, and that means Tirza must like you, or she wouldn’t have showed you our route,” Jax explained. “Plus, no one said we would show you our deepest secrets.”
The red-coated man had a slight accent, but not much of one. I wondered how many of the ULA forces on Orpheus were native to the planet and how many had come from other worlds. For that matter, how many of them had even seen other worlds?
“Thank you for your hospitality,” the princess murmured.
“Oh, you’ll pay for it,” Jax laughed. “What kind of drugs do you have to sell?”
“Most of it is back on our ship,” I said, before this man got any ideas. “But I brought a sample with us to show you what we’re working with. Murisia, and medical-grade too.”
“Mother’s Mercy,” Jax gasped. “Let’s see it.”
I glanced at the door that led out of the storage room. No one else had appeared in answer to our knock, but there was no way to see the rest of the ULA facility without looking suspicious. I didn’t distrust Jax, but all the same, I would have felt better if I had a clearer idea of the layout of the hideout around us.
“Sure thing,” was all I said.
I pulled out the fluorescen
t green brick from my pack and handed it over. Jax pulled back the tape, took a light sniff, and put the tape back in place as he grinned.
“Well, Leon and Lora,” he exhaled, “if you two really are the ones that I heard all that chatter on the radio about, and you have a whole ship full of Mother’s Mercy, you are just about the best thing I’ve seen this year.”
“I take it that means you’re interested in buying?” I asked.
“Depends on the price,” Jax answered.
“I tell you what-- I’ll drop the price for you by ten percent,” I told him, “if you can spare some fuel for our ship and some food for our supply stores.”
Jax pressed his lips together.
“I’ll drop it by a quarter if you throw in a stabilizer coil,” I added after I told him the price I had in mind.
“Well, look...” the red-coated ULA fighter exhaled, “I can spare you food and fuel, but I can’t help you with the coil. Our smaller crafts have all taken such hits in the last couple weeks that we’ve only got a few we’re still able to run, and they’re the only ones with intact stabilizers.”
I loved it when people told me exactly what I needed to know. I hadn’t even asked yet, and Jax had already told me that he had intact stabilizers. Not a lot of them, of course, but after all, I only needed one to fix the Skyhawk.
“I can work with that,” I told him. “Do you think you can spare one of those crafts to take us back to our ship with some of your guys? You can drop us off with our supplies and money, and we’ll load you up with murisia.”
“Where’s your ship?” the ULA fighter asked.
“Back in the woods,” I said vaguely. “Not far, unless you’re trying to get there on foot.”
“Fair enough.” Jax nodded. “Let’s get you loaded up and out of here, then. If your ship’s in the woods, I can guarantee my guys will not want to be there after dark.”
“Can’t blame them for that one,” I said with a smile.