***
Phillips was organizing the security detail as they tried to push back the attackers. He slammed into the fallen table that Dominguez was reloading behind. “Dominguez, we need to get you into the tunnels!” Phillips yelled.
“Fuck that!” Dominguez yelled. She wasn’t about to just run off and leave her people there. Just as she was about to go on, there was another incoming message from Moretti.
“Go!” She turned and raised her rifle. She sent round after round at the moving shadows or where tracers were coming. The visibility was getting worse under the red dust storm.
The gangs knew that they were going in the right direction but they didn’t know about the mines. Their communications had been cut off by Voras, who found them too annoying to deal with.
This was leading to a problem with them fighting one another to try to get to Dominguez.
“Looks like they’re directly targeting you, like they don’t care about anything other than killing you. I believe it was set up by Senator Rimateus. Based on what I’ve seen, he has some kind of connection with the Luyten Conglomerate and it looks like there was a merchant with some issues with Mark and the others who made Rimateus to use his connections to try to get back at us,” Moretti said.
“Does he think that I’m this easy to kill?” Dominguez yelled, pissed at the condescending nature of these all-powerful dipshits.
She didn’t blame Mark at all. He had done whatever he needed to; his fight was her fight, after all. It just looked like it was a bit closer now.
She linked Phillips in on the conversation.
“All right, Phillips, we’ll take the tunnels. That way, we can draw them away into the slums, where we’ll be able to move more. M, I need a way to make me show up for them and pull them away from the greenhouse,” Dominguez said.
Moretti made a noise as if he wanted to say something but it seemed that he thought better of it. “All right, I can get into their armor. There were some additions that Nivad had added to the armor while they were being designed; they passed through and people didn’t know. It’ll make it so that a number of sets of armor start to fail. I can also block them off from the Luyten Conglomerate and one another to create confusion.” Moretti spoke as he worked.
“Get it done and let me know when it’s good for me to start to move,” Dominguez said.
“Start moving now. The farther away you are, the more time they’ll need to catch up to you. I’ll start issuing warnings to the people in the areas you’re in—that will reduce civilian casualties and some of them will probably sell the information to the other gangs, making them have to turn and come after you. Unless they want to be destroyed by the Luyten Conglomerate, they’ll need to kill you,” Moretti said.
“Lovely. Great to be a big pain in their ass.” Dominguez pulled up the information on the tunnels as well as the information on where the enemy was, their reinforcements, and the rest.
It wasn’t looking good but this was the best choice she had out of a very shitty situation.
“Prepare to move!” Dominguez said to the protection detail as she sent a new plan update to Trina.
***
“What did you just say?” Voras demanded, raising a hand to his head to try to hear clearer.
“I have information on Dominguez’s whereabouts. She isn’t in the greenhouse.” The person on the other end of the line might not be someone with great power but there was no denying the smugness in their voice.
“Where!” Voras yelled. He needed to confirm this.
There was a possibility of the greenhouse having a way to escape. He didn’t think that they would have told Dominguez this kind of secret or that she would have run away. After all, it wasn’t like her personality at all; she seemed like the kind of woman who would fight through thick and thin with her people. It was one of her strongest attributes and why her people were willing to walk into hell for her without question.
“Information isn’t cheap,” the person said with a half laugh.
Voras wanted to yell at them, but there was no way to trace the call and if this person had good information, it wouldn’t take him long to verify it if that was the case. “How much? And say it quick.”
“Forty thousand credits, wireless,” the person said. An information packet was sent from the same number.
Voras hesitated and then accepted it. He couldn’t fuck this up or instead of riches, he would be the one on the executioner’s block.
“Good doing business with you.” The person left the channel as an information packet with blurry pictures appeared. It was hard to see what was going on clearly but there was a location data and time stamp, as well as the blurry image of people wearing trooper-like armor with Westerly Three patches on their shoulders.
Voras checked the location again and called someone else.
“What is it?” someone asked in a bored voice.
“I need to know if Dominguez and a group of Westerly Three people ran through the Chinto neighborhood,” Voras asked.
There was silence on the line.
“Sixty thousand credits,” the information broker said.
“Shit.” Voras cursed. If it had only been a few thousand, then there was no way that they could have gone through there. With the price so high, it was clear that the information broker knew more about where Dominguez was, and also knew that he was trying to attack the greenhouse she was in.
Voras sent the money without hesitation. “Send me her info. Keep it updated and I’ll pay three hundred thousand.”
“Understood.” The broker closed the call but a link appeared with an anonymous chat sending him messages on Dominguez’s position.
“Yan! I need you to take a group of people to this location. Take the Faceless Ones with you!” Voras wanted to confirm without a doubt; then he would rush to support Yan.
Voras saw a Pistol Monkey, standing out in the open and firing with his pistols, get cut down by rifle fire from within the greenhouse.
***
They’d really stirred up the hornet’s nest. It looked as if all of the people in the greenhouse were pissed off and fighting back as well. Dominguez’s eyes thinned as she saw red markers start to appear behind her and half of the protection detail she had taken with her. Phillips, Reese, and Berryman were with her.
She’d left the rest at the greenhouse to hold that position. If they could for another hour, then they would have reinforcements to push back the other three gangs.
Dominguez and the three with her slammed through piles of garbage and entered a street. Their sensors built into the suits worked at their max to try to find out what was on the other side of the street. The red dust made it impossible for them to see.
The red dust was made up of rust and sand. Most of the dirt across Earth had been turned to sand. And there were so many machines that had been brought to Earth that when they rusted, the flakes of rust had piled up, turning the dust red.
Many people said that it was because of the blood that had been spilt on Earth.
“Fuck it. If they want to ambush us, why can’t we do the same to them?”
Dominguez led them forward as Moretti watched over the situation. Even though he was between star systems, with the information network that he had created on Earth and the network that the Victor Corporation had sowed across known space, he was linked right in.
Although the information brokers thought that they were the best at their game and gave updates to Voras, Moretti was changing the information that they were getting and altering the messages before they could be sent so that Voras and Yan were getting out-of-date information and gave Dominguez more time to move.
The four people ran down a street with a bend in it.
“Here is good,” Dominguez said. They tossed out sensor bots as Dominguez picked out a house.
Berryman went first and crashed through a door; the others rushed in behind. They scanned the place. A family in the house looked scared as they tried to
escape the storm.
The man of the house held a shotgun. Even if they were just normal folks, no one was unarmed in the slums.
“Get out of here—gang fight,” Phillips said.
The man looked at them all. Noticing their patches, he nodded and gathered his family together. They might be malnourished and have a hard life, but they wouldn’t give it up easily. They pulled up their outerwear and headed off.
The others turned to the wall that faced the road and were already starting to pull out their blades and cut through the wall. It didn’t take them long to cut out firing ports in the wall.
They might not be able to see on the other side of the street but that was what the sensors they had thrown out were for if Moretti lost track of the powered armor.
“Here they come,” Dominguez said.
Everyone tensed up as they looked toward the fifty or so people who were rushing after them.
“Wish we had some fucking air support,” Berryman spat.
“Well shit, SNAFU, dude,” Reese said.
Berryman snorted but didn’t say anything else as he adjusted the repulsor in his shoulder.
“Ready,” Dominguez said in a hushed voice, the sound of the powered armor coming in and out as the wind whipped through the empty streets.
By the shadows alone, one wasn’t able to pick out where the armor was.
Thankfully, they had red markers telling them where their enemy was supposed to be.
Dominguez waited as they just reached the bend in the road. “Now!”
They opened fire as one. Dominguez and Phillips used their grenade launchers, dropping two grenades right into their midst. Berryman opened up with his repulsor; tracers filled the short street as people were cut down under the vicious fire.
Dominguez and Phillips fired their rifles instead of reloading their launchers, picking off the stragglers around Berryman’s cone of fire.
“Grenade!” Reese yelled as he threw out one grenade and got back into cover, running underneath a window before barging through another door and throwing out another grenade. The muffled thumps and sounds of dirt raining down were barely audible over the other’s weapons fire.
The weapons fire soon started to cut down. Dominguez and Phillips were looking for targets while Berryman looked over his smoking repulsor.
All of them had the newly upgraded weaponry.
Even in powered armor, their rounds were strong enough to punch through the armor and cut them down.
“Reloading.” Dominguez unloaded and reloaded her grenade launcher.
“Don’t look like there’s anything left alive in there,” Reese said from where he looked over the battlefield. The gang members didn’t have time to react, to try to get into cover. Unable to see their enemy, they had been easy targets.
“Let’s get a move on!” Dominguez said, her weapons reloaded.
“Good to go!” Berryman said.
“Reloading.” Phillips quickly replaced his grenade.
Dominguez, seeing them all ready, pushed out between two pieces of sheet metal that turned into a back door to the dwelling they’d been in.
***
Voras let out a yell and punched a wall as all of the life signs from the party he sent after Dominguez disappeared. “Fucker!”
Yan was his second-in-command but he was also someone he saw as his own son. Close relationships in the slum were only something to get used against you, so Voras didn’t tell anyone of how he wanted Yan to succeed him and thought of him as someone who would bring the Brass Jackals to new heights.
Now it would never be told or realized.
Voras now had some four hundred gang members forced to follow his orders through the power of the Luyten Conglomerate.
A channel opened from the Luyten Conglomerate. “Are you all a bunch of idiots? Why did you only send fifty after her! Kill her!” Mister Fai cut off the channel.
His words confirmed two things. One, he was watching the battle and two, that Dominguez was part of the group that had turned around and ambushed Yan and his people.
“Let’s go!” The leader of the Pistol Monkeys held a pistol in each hand as he rushed toward were Yan had been last.
Mister Fai had opened the information that Voras was looking over and shared it with everyone. Now there was little order to things, just a mad rush to kill off Dominguez, who was running for her life.
“Get me that bitch’s head!” Voras yelled.
The Faceless Ones leader waved their hand and their members rushed to complete their commands.
Behind them, the sounds of weapons fire dimmed until it ended.
The greenhouse had survived the battle but it was nearly completely ruined. There were people from the greenhouse as well as the Westerly Three Complex Crew and the three attacking gangs across the dirt and ruins.
Voras was filled with anger and frustration. Having his leadership ripped away from him, losing Yan, and getting yelled at by Fai: all of it served to make him want to do nothing more than kill Dominguez and her people.
***
“All right, people, we’re the reinforcements for General Dominguez! Looks like the corps want her gone. The Pistol Monkeys, Faceless Ones, and the Brass Jackals are all working together to hunt her down.
“She’s on the run, heading for us right now, but we need to move to secure her and pull her back to base.
“The gangs have powered armor and newer weapons. Their striking power shouldn’t be enough to get through our armor. That said, I don’t want anyone trying to fucking figure that out and show off.” Second Lieutenant Wei might look as if he were fresh from the streets of Earth, but the look in his eyes and the way he held himself told he was a veteran of battles. Surprisingly, he could find his asshole with only one hand. He’d taken a demotion in rank in order to be part of the Defender Armor program.
He had gained command of his own platoon of troopers trained in Defender Armor. The armor was stronger, lighter, and faster than the older armor that they had been wearing. It made them a powerful force to deal with on the battlefield. At least the simulations showed so.
“Disembark in five!” the truck driver yelled. In these conditions, trying to fly in a combat shuttle was asking for the engines to burn out. It meant that they had to do things the old-fashioned way: driving and then running.
“We’re here!”
The truck convoy came to a dead end. The rear opened up as the Defender Armor troopers jumped out of the back.
Sergeants took command as they headed for the four-man trooper team that was running their asses off toward them.
This was their first official mission and they couldn’t fuck it up. If they did, then Dominguez and the head of the Westerly Three Crew might die.
They had a chain of command but Dominguez and the other Victors had status as almost legends in the eyes of the people who knew of them.
They started to scale over the factories that had stopped working years ago. They jumped between beams that had been torn apart by some unknown force.
None of them talked, all of them grim-faced death dealers. It was time they showed just what the Westerly Three Crew was capable of.
Chapter Five
Resoi Building Complex
Earth, Sol System
5/3556
Dominguez grunted as she and Reese grabbed onto Berryman, hauling his heavy ass over the wall they had climbed.
They had made it out of the slums and into some of the factory districts. A few of the factory districts still worked, pumping out all kinds of goods.
The workers who saw them moved away; even the guards kept their distance. By now, the word was out that the Pistol Monkeys, Faceless Ones, and Brass Jackals were together and hunting down people from the Westerly Three Complex.
With this in mind, few people wanted to get involved and instead stood back and watched.
Gangs fought all the time; this kind of thing was normal to them. The fact that the figures and the groups were la
rger made it a problem that no one wanted to deal with.
Berryman flopped on the floor before picking himself up. “Eh, let’s go!” he yelled out. They started to run as the sound of rounds cracking out filled the air. The lead Pistol Monkeys were right behind them, firing at them.
“Get to cover!” Dominguez said.
Berryman was just turning when he caught three rounds and dropped to the ground.
Phillips fired his grenade launcher into the front rank of the Pistol Monkeys. They were blown apart and the others spread out, finding cover and shooting.
Reese was on Berryman, checking his vitals. “Nothing!” Reese yelled, the anger clear in his voice as he had just lost one of his best friends.
Dominguez had no words as she fired her grenade launcher at a wall near the Pistol Monkeys. The wall came down, burying a few of them and making it harder for them to see.
“We’ve got to go! Grab his repulsor,” Dominguez said.
“Yes, ma’am.” Reese checked the weapon while lying down. With a grunt, he started firing at the oncoming gangs, forcing them to stay in cover and fire wildly.
“Covering!” Reese yelled.
“Moving!” Phillips and Dominguez said.
They rushed backward, reciting, I’m up—he sees me—I’m down. They lurched for the nearest cover and turned around to cover Reese.
“Covering!” Phillips and Dominguez yelled. Tracers ripped through the factory as the security guards and workers rushed away or hid in what cover they could find.
A Faceless One rushed out, to be cut down by Reese.
A grenade exploded somewhere nearby and a Brass Jackal rushed forward with a screamer. They fired the thing but their aim was off as it slammed into a wall, blowing it up and making the entire large industrial building shake dangerously.
“Reese!” Dominguez yelled.
“Sorry, ma’am! I don’t think I can follow this order this time! I swore to protect you, and I can’t move right now,” Reese said.
Enemies on All Sides (Maraukian War Book 4) Page 2