Black Holiday (The Black Chronicles Book 2)

by J. M. Anjewierden

  Ms. Hoyt answered again, nodding her head in agreement at the sensible question.

  “Yes. These towers came later, much later, as the city expanded. There used to be three kilometers of open ground between the spaceport and the edge of the city.”

  “I guess they just built it farther away to start with outside Ena,” Gertrude said, looking thoughtful. “Our main spaceport is still at least a half-dozen kilometers outside the capital.”

  Morgan nodded, turning back to look out the window.

  Emily said nothing, but privately added that, local protestations to the contrary, the capital of Zion was still a far smaller metropolis than Ena, despite being founded a decade or two earlier.

  I suppose having all those religious groups sharing a planet encourages a somewhat more spread out civilization.

  At last the shuttle touched down, the floor beneath them jolting slightly as the landing struts connected with the shuttle pad.

  Sloppy, Emily thought, suppressing the urge to frown. We shouldn’t have been able to feel the landing at all.

  She knew she was being unfair, comparing the shuttle pilot to those military trained, including her own pilot whom she had hired away from the Navy after his term of enlistment had run out. But judging performance had been an important skill for Emily long before she had led men into battle.

  The passengers started gathering their things and moving towards the exit. Emily waited, settling back against her seat and closing her eyes, if only for a moment. It was tradition for her to be the last to disembark the vehicle, as the ranking (only, really) noble on board, but even without the tradition she would have done the same.

  Emily had no problems mingling with the people. Indeed, she took great pride in not being one of those puffed up lords hiding in their estates and never going out in public. She enjoyed mingling with people. But mingling among and being jostled by were hardly the same thing.

  At last the crowd had exited, meandering slowly towards the exit by the sounds of it. Emily stood, preceded down the ramp by her guards and her friends before them.

  Haruhi was still yawning, carried on her mother’s back, her arms and legs wrapped around Gertrude’s neck and waist.

  Gertrude was a strong woman, but she would no doubt tire quickly, given the gravity differential between Zion at .89g and Albion of 1.3g. A forty percent increase in apparent weight was nothing to disregard. Haruhi was getting too big to carry in any case.

  Morgan of course didn’t seem to notice the increase in gravity, still prancing about like she weighed nothing at all, carrying her own bag as well as Gertrude’s. She had even put on Haruhi’s backpack, the weight unnoticed.

  Emily noted as she descended the ramp that it was an unusually blustery day – the trees lining the top of the landing pad were bent almost all the way over in the wind, though they naturally didn’t feel the wind down at the bottom of the bowl-like shuttle pad.

  They did hear it howling above them, to the point that she could hardly hear the people talking a scant twenty paces away.

  Down at the bottom of the ramp Haruhi leaned over closer to Gertrude’s head, whispering something to her.

  Whatever it was had Gertrude nodding, then she put Haruhi down, and the pair headed at a brisk pace towards the main building. Given Haruhi’s slightly odd gait Emily felt confident to hazard a guess that a trip to the head was in short order.

  As they departed Emily’s uplink chimed several different notifications. She didn’t hear them over the wind, of course, but it also helpfully vibrated, indicating at least one of the notifications was urgent.

  Gertrude will be some time, Emily thought to herself, and there is no sense in delaying any bad news. She stepped back into the shuttle to better hear while simultaneously pulling up the notifications on the holographic display, in order of importance.

  The first few were, despite their flagged importance, little more than routine summons to meetings of the Lords, meetings she had of course missed while she was off world.

  A few updates on projects – those she would have to pursue later, of course – and some light mail traffic from friends and family.

  This must be a first, Emily thought as she re-exited the shuttle, I return home from a trip and there is no bad news at all?

  This state of affairs didn’t last long. It never did for Emily.

  The air car came screaming in behind the shuttle, so Emily couldn’t see it at first. She heard it just fine, and she did see her guards stiffening as the potential threat manifested itself.

  It swung around in a tight circle over the shuttle pad, the side door already sliding open.

  Old training kicked in. Emily was moving even before her conscious mind registered the large weapon in a jury-rigged harness poking out the open side.

  The obvious choice was the interior or the shuttle, but Emily had rejected that as a possibility immediately. It was too far to run. She would also be exposed if she braved the ramp. She would also be trapped in the shuttle with only one way in and out. Even if there was enough fuel – unlikely given the totality of circumstances – she couldn’t risk taking off as long as there were innocents still on the shuttle pad.

  Instead Emily moved to take cover under the shuttle, giving her cover from the bullets raining down while impeding her movement as little as possible. Once safely there she was able to take better stock of the battlefield.

  Her bodyguards were responding as well as she had come to expect. Their sidearms were already out, covering each other and her expertly. The guard closest to the shuttle – Mr. Knighton – carefully returned fire from a crouched position next to the ramp.

  The rest of the passengers, understandably, panicked. Most had rushed towards the terminal’s entrance. A few others had either thought as she had or simply followed her under the shuttle.

  There was a bottleneck of people at the door. Emily couldn’t really see more than the crowd’s feet from her vantage point, so she could not tell why.

  Emily knew that Gertrude and Haruhi had, thank God, made it inside before the shooting had started, but where was Morgan?

  Emily looked about again for the girl. Focusing on looking for Morgan helped her push away the instinct to pull her own weapon and wade into the fight personally. General she might be, it was hard to put aside the training and reflexes of so many years leading men from the front.

  Good Lord, do I actually miss combat? Emily thought as she searched, the familiar rush of adrenaline focusing her while it also cut down on her peripheral vision and sense of hearing. There. Opposite Tom.

  Morgan had managed to find cover under the ramp, but she was on the other side of it from her man, much more exposed to the guns above – for there were multiple gunmen now. Assailants with more normal rifles added their fire to the larger weapon they had hastily mounted to the air car.

  “Morgan!” Emily shouted, despite knowing there was little chance Morgan could hear her over the howling wind, let alone the thundering guns or the staccato of the bullets hitting the reinforced floor of the landing pad. “Morgan, can you crawl to me?”

  Morgan didn’t respond, indeed, she wasn’t reacting to anything.

  She had curled up into the fetal position, her hands clapped over her head, bags dropped, forgotten. Emily had assumed it was to minimize the target she presented, With a sinking heart she realized that Morgan had frozen in panic or fear. Or both.

  This will complicate matters.

  Emily didn’t blame or judge Morgan for freezing. How many times had she seen it in trained Marines over the years, even battle-hardened ones? But she was a bit surprised, given the things the girl had already triumphed over.

  What can she do though? Emily reminded herself. We took her weapon from her.

  There was nothing she could do about Morgan for the moment. She had no orders to give her ‘soldiers,’ since technically her bodyguards could order her about under the circumstances. So Emily hunched under the shuttle farther and took another
look at everything going on.

  The bullets weren’t putting holes in the shuttle pad, so they couldn’t be using Iridium Specials. The lack of explosions as they hit ruled out the use of penetrator rounds. That meant ‘normal’ bullets, which was good. Both her bodyguards and Emily herself had light ballistic resistant material woven into their bodysuits. It was hardly up to the level of a skinsuit, but there was a better than even chance normal bullets wouldn’t penetrate, even if it would hurt like a copper-plated bitch.

  Emily pulled her own sidearm from its concealed holster. Unlike the attackers – and her own men, actually – she had an Iridium Special, one designed for maximum concealability and reliability. For an IS pistol it had unusually large ammunition, more than twice the size of Morgan’s .17 caliber weapon. This limited capacity in such a small pistol, but of course meant each individual bullet was much more damaging.

  Against an unarmored target like the air car above, Emily’s weapon could easily punch through the vehicle’s shell and potentially damage the engine and parts underneath. Assuming she had a shot, of course, which she did not at the moment.

  Then again… did anyone have a shot?

  Emily chastised herself for not realizing it sooner, but it finally hit home that she was only hearing screams of fear, but not of pain.

  Most of the passengers were huddled over by the doors, with as close to no cover as made no difference, and the ones over by the shuttle weren’t much better protected. And yet the attackers hadn’t managed to hit anyone that Emily could see, not even her guards who were actively shooting back.

  The doors.

  The doors were closed. The only way that could be the case was with deliberate sabotage. That meant there had to be an accomplice on the ground, with access to the systems to seal them in.

  A distraction? It made sense. Hitting a single small target from a moving air car was a difficult proposition for a trained marksman. If they did not care about collateral damage a bomb was a much surer way of killing her, even if it was simply dropped out of the same air car.

  Mere moments passed as Emily thought through this, and she immediately started scanning the people again looking for her hypothetical saboteur.

  Too late.

  By the time she noted the unremarkable man in equally unremarkable mechanic’s coveralls emblazoned with the name of the spaceport he was scant paces away from her, crouched under the shuttle, his hands already bringing up what looked like a syringe.

  Emily swung her pistol around to engage him, but she had been focused outwards, and he was already moving forward.

  “Down, Lady Novan!” her nearest guard, Del Arroz, shouted, moving to intercept the man.

  Del Arroz was not going to be in time either.

  Time seemed to slow as the man continued his drive towards Emily. With complete calm she considered the angle of his lunge, the chances of getting her gun trained on him before he arrived, how best to parry the needle, and even what she was likely to hit behind him if she fired and missed.

  Then, unnoticed by the attacker and Emily both, Morgan launched herself at the man’s back, the speed of her attack aided by her heavy-gravity bred muscles and the not inconsequential fact that her short stature meant she didn’t have to crouch to move under the shuttle.

  The pair went down in a tangle of limbs, one of her arms wrapped around his neck while the other was reaching for the needle.

  Emily finished bringing her weapon to bear just in time for Del Arroz to interpose himself between them, his own weapon at the ready.

  Emily wanted to yell at him for getting in the way, but she bit her tongue. It was his job to protect her first, foremost, and only. She knew he’d do whatever he could to help Morgan, but he couldn’t put her at risk to do it.

  Meanwhile the man had managed to throw off Morgan, slamming her into the ground hard enough to momentarily stun her, and was scrambling towards the dropped syringe.

  “Don’t,” Del Arroz barked, taking careful aim. The wind had died down, leaving the only sound that of the idling air car. After the wind it felt almost silent, an eerie pall falling over the area.

  Trying not to distract him, Emily took a step back from Del Arroz and then a step to the left, giving her at least something approximating a clear lane of fire.

  The man looked at Del Arroz, his eyes narrowed, his face distorted with ugly hatred. He actually sneered as he stopped moving towards his chosen weapon.

  “You might have stopped me here,” he said defiantly, edging a bit closer to Del Arroz. “But we’ll win in the end.”

  “Stop right there,” Del Arroz commanded.

  “Morgan?” Emily called out as the young woman stirred. “I need you to move over here now.”

  Morgan staggered to her feet, shaking her head in confusion before she nodded.

  Several things happened all at once.

  The air car, which Emily realized had stopped firing moments earlier, swung down low until it was less than a hundred centimeters above the ground. The air blast of the rapid descent washed over everyone under the shuttle, staggering them.

  Taken by surprise by the move, Emily and Del Arroz both had to brace themselves, their aim wavering momentarily.

  The attacker seemed to have been anticipating it, however, and moved with the air as he rushed forward, grabbing Morgan around the throat with one hand while the other fished something out of his coveralls – another syringe.

  He shoved Morgan between him and Emily, jabbing the needle into her neck roughly.

  “I’ll be going now,” the man said, giggling a little, almost manically. “Anyone so much as twitches towards me, and I push this,” he wiggled the thumb that was resting on the syringe’s plunger, “and the girl dies. I know you don’t care much about civilian deaths, Butcher. But I’m betting even you aren’t too keen to explain to everyone why you got some poor bystander killed, especially a cute, young one. And if not, well, at least this will turn more people against you and make us stronger.”

  As he talked the man dragged Morgan back towards the air car, the pair moving painfully slow, each step marked by another grimace on Morgan’s face as the needle in her neck was jostled.

  “Girl, take off your uplink,” he commanded Morgan, who thankfully had the sense not to argue with the man. She complied, keeping her movements slow and steady, both to keep him placated and to avoid moving the needle. The sturdy military model dropped to the ground with a clatter.

  It was too much to hope for that he’d forget about it, Emily thought.

  As this happened Del Arroz dragged Emily back to the relative safety of the ramp, even though the bulk of the shuttle still shielded them from the firing arc of the weapons of the people in the air car.

  “Let her go and I swear I will not stop you from escaping,” Emily said, holding up her hands in a conciliatory gesture, releasing her grip on her pistol so it hung loose on her finger by the trigger guard.

  The man just giggled again, the bone-chilling high-pitched sound of a man on the verge of truly losing it.

  “You’ll forgive me if I don’t believe you,” he said as the giggles subsided once he reached the air car. “Wouldn’t want you to shoot our car out of the sky after we leave, would we?”

  The last Emily saw of Morgan was as the man yanked out the syringe and hands from inside the air car yanked both of them inside. The door closed almost before they were all the way in, and the air car shot off out of the shuttle pad.

  The only things indicating Morgan had ever been there was her uplink, a forgotten bag by the ramp, and a pair of fallen sandals lying on the ground near where the air car had been.

  The moment they were clear Emily tried tying in to her emergency networks, the police, military, any of it. It was no good. All signals were being jammed, likely by something left behind by the saboteur.

  “Get a man inside to a wired line,” Emily ordered, gesturing towards the still closed door. “Hopefully someone inside has alerted the police, but we
need to be sure they know this is now a hostage situation. They need to track that car.”

  Emily did not voice her fears, that if they had planned well enough to disrupt local wireless communication they likely had tech to disrupt the tracking systems and local cameras as well.

  How do I explain this to Gertrude? She thought. She had told spouses and parents – and blood ties or no, Gertrude was a mother to Morgan – many times that their beloved child or spouse would not be coming home. But that had always been with soldiers, usually from battle. The pain was not any less, but at least they had known it was a possibility. Giving the news to her that her husband had died almost broke her; can I do that to Gertrude again?

  CHAPTER 4

  It is a disturbingly common phenomenon to romanticize criminals. The ‘thief with a heart of gold’ or the ‘assassin with a code of ethics’ are laughably inaccurate in reflecting the true horrors most career criminals are all too willing to commit. If a man is willing to hurt someone for money, they’ll hurt them for any reason at all. And never forget that for some of them the hurting is the goal of their crimes all on its own.

  - Dr. Susan Baptist, Head Profiler for Landing, planet Calvin

  THE FEAR was overwhelming at first.

  She was utterly alone, surrounded by killers, trapped in a small space that reeked of gunpowder and smoke.

  Worse, she had nothing that could be of use to her. No pistol, no tools, no uplink. Her baggage was probably still where she had dropped it on the landing pad.

  Even something as simple as her shoes might have made her feel at least a little bit better. There were so many ways she could hurt her feet in an escape attempt, after all. A kick from a bare foot did a lot less damage than a shod one, at least to whoever was being kicked. Broken toes were all too likely and, again, a liability if she got the chance to run.

  “Get her tied up, Bert. We don’t want her flailing about and getting in the way, or damaging something.” One of the men said. The fat one, she mentally called him.