Horns of the Ram (Dominion Book 2)

by Austin Rogers

  Kastor aimed his handgun at the ankle, under the kevlar pants, and fired. The American-Terran dropped down to a knee on that leg, and Kastor leaped over the sandbags to charge him. With gritted teeth, the Terran grabbed his gun with both hands again and fired at Kastor. Defender bullets pounded him but did little more than to make him flinch and throw of hiss aim. Kastor used the opportunity to sprint closer, wind up his sword, and swing upward, making contact just above the adam’s apple. With surprising ease, the man’s head sliced cleanly off and traveled several meters through the air.

  Taking advantage of the terror on his enemies’ faces, he darted through the inner fence gate and dove into the next sandbag bunker. Gun muzzles flashed as he rolled between four Confed soldiers. One of them kept firing even into one of his comrades as Kastor inserted himself between them all. His blazer cut through one man’s thigh and thrust into another’s stomach smooth as an oar into the water. Leaving the blazer for a moment, Kastor twirled around, karate-chopped the last man in the throat and slapped away his gun. The Confed soldier recovered fast, kicking Kastor against the sandbags on the far side of the bunker then charging. Kastor grabbed his blazer again and flicked it out, pointing the tip of it out and letting the charging man’s momentum do the work. Sure enough, the blade skewered him, straight into the diaphragm at the base of the ribcage, stopping him mid-stride. He coughed blood as his face shifted suddenly from anger to fear.

  Three more Confed soldiers charged from the front entrance of the building, firing their guns all at once. Kastor knelt and hid behind his new human shield as bullets thunked against the Terran’s back. But then a perfect shot—from one of the Defender snipers, Kastor guessed—plowed a crater-like hole through one of the oncoming soldier’s faces. The other two paused to look at him, and Kastor used that as his opportunity to get rid of his human shield, leap to his enemies, and slice them to pieces. Blood sprayed across the ground with each swish of his blade.

  As they fell, one more Confed soldier let out an enraged cry from the adjacent sandbag bunker and swiveled the machine gun over in Kastor’s direction. The Sagittarian warrior vaulted back into cover as the heavy-duty bullets pounded sandbags and pavement and fallen bodies. He laid flat across the ground as the machine gun chewed through his protective barricade.

  Then, overhead, he heard a menacing scream go from loud to ear-splitting in two seconds as a lightning flash whipped straight down into one of the buildings where a flanking Defender team was positioned. The seven-floor building shuttered as the projectile tore through the middle of its concrete and steel guts. All the glass windows blew out in unison, and an earth-rocking blast exploded out from the lower floors. Dust billowed outward as the crumbling building roared on its way down.

  Noticing a lull in the machine gun fire, Kastor used the temporary distraction. He thrust himself up, flipped the blazer handle around in his hand, and threw it like a spear at the last Confed soldier. The tip of the blade penetrated the flak jacket at the ribs, causing the soldier to double over but not fall. He pulled out his handgun at the same time Kastor did. Both guns fired. Both shots connected.

  Kastor’s shot landed just above the man’s collarbone and dropped him instantly, while the Terran’s shot bored into Kastor’s left shoulder, right into the bone. Hellish pain spiked down his arm and chest and up his neck, pulsating at the point of impact. Kastor touched his fingers to the wound and felt warm blood, but he had no time to worry about that right now. More shrieks and ground-quaking explosions surrounded them, tearing up the city all around them. One could come down on their heads any second.

  Defenders ran through the thick, tawny pall of dust toward him, noses and mouths covered with their shirts or shemaghs.

  He lifted his cuff, switched on a channel to all Defenders in his detachment, and shouted, “Everybody inside the OCSS!Move!”

  Chapter Sixty

  Cristiana led her team of Sagittarian warrior-born in Confed uniforms down a zigzagging path through the Old City. Worn sandy-beige stone mixed with glass and steel. The dull black of inductive power-transferring streets nestled between cracked, sun-backed cobblestone sidewalks. Terran-brand autos, front and back ends indistinguishable from each other, sat idly in areas wide enough to fit them, solar panels popped out and tilted to face the afternoon sun. Technology from the third century intermingled with that of the twenty-third.

  If not for the flashes in the sky and the fearsome, growling explosions sending quakes through the ground, Cristiana would find the Old City a fascinating place to explore. The shrieking orbital strikes in every direction prevented her from admiring Jerusalem’s assortment of anachronisms. The louder ones made her flinch and check the sky, but of course if one did come down on them, they’d be obliterated before they had the chance to look up.

  She felt a vibration around her forearm and chose to ignore it. Probably a message from one of their pilots. Then, half a block later, she felt it again, longer this time, so she halted her team, knelt behind an auto, and pulled up her sleeve to expose her cuff. Her team moved into positions to form a secure perimeter.

  A holo field appeared above her cuff of Larkin from the shoulders up, movements indicating walking strides. His perplexed eyes looked straight forward instead of at the camera on the cuff of his outstretched arm.

  “Cristiana, you there?” he asked fast, glancing down at his cuff.

  Her cuff’s holo camera initialized. The recording light flicked on. “What’s going on? Where are you heading? I thought you were staying on the Temple Mount.”

  A shriek to the northwest preceded a hard slam into the earth, sending a shockwave through the pavement under Cristiana’s boot and knee.

  “Defenders are making a push for the Lion Gate in the northeast,” Larkin replied absently. “Rockets weakened the Terrans’ strong points on the wall. They called for reinforcements.” He ducked into a door alcove and paused to look at the camera. “How close are you to the Old City Security Station?”

  “Uh.” She looked up to survey her surroundings, realizing the orbital strike from a moment ago had landed in the general area they were headed. “Still a couple hundred meters, I think. Why? What happened?” She knew something must’ve happened for him to interrupt her mission like this.

  “The Defenders just took control of the security station,” Larkin said, still seeming agitated about something else. His tone of voice suggested there was more news than that. “Listen, Cristiana, you need to be careful.”

  Cristiana frowned at him, feeling a pulse of impatience. “Careful? I’ve got twenty warrior-born with me. If the target’s fallen, we need to go!” She stood.

  Larkin pursed his lips. “There’s something you should see. A few minutes ago, a Confed security camera caught this . . .”

  Cristian watched as he tapped a few buttons on his cuff’s screen. The holo field above her cuff shifted to a grainy video feed, obviously converted from a fisheye-lens camera. It took a moment for Cristiana to orient her mind to what was happening in the video. It seemed to be shooting from the ceiling of an overhang down onto the main entrance of a building—glass doors on one side of the holo field, and on the other, a few semi-circular sandbag embankments with Confed soldiers firing behind them. Their weapons all shifted in unison, following some target outside of camera view.

  Then, in a blur, a tall, well-built figure leaped over one of the sandbag walls and rolled through the handful of flustered Confed troops. One Terran swiveled his combat rifle in the direction of his fellow soldier, still firing, putting several rounds into the other’s chest and knocking him back against sandbags. The blurry figure rose, movements like the whip of lightning in a storm.

  Cristiana’s breath caught in her throat as she saw the all-too-familiar flash of a blade in the mysterious figure’s hands. Not just any blade. She was watching the bright, yellow-white glow of a blazer, slicing with ease through its victims. Cristiana tapped the pause button as the figure turned to partially face the camera, his bla
zer sword in mid-upward-slash through a Confed soldier’s torso. The holo resolution was too poor to make out the details of the face, but the body shape indicated a man.

  ASagittarian. A nobleman. A warrior-born.

  “I see now how the Defenders have been so successful,” Larkin said in a dour voice. “The Grand Lumis was right. Theydid acquire outside aid. From one of our own.”

  “What man of noble birth would fight for these savages?” Cristiana whispered, awed by the senselessness of the image hovering in the air before her eyes.

  “I don’t know,” Larkin replied. “But tread carefully. He just took out a full company of armed and armored Confed troops—with a blazer.”

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Kastor kicked open a pair of double doors, and his dust-coated Defenders ran into a big, open room containing a bullpen of cubicles separated by low barriers. Four Confed personnel worked frantically at various workstations, shouting back and forth. They all flinched and looked up in unison as the Defenders rushed in.

  “Get away from the computers!” Kastor commanded in a harsh voice.

  One of the Confed techs picked up a handgun sitting on his desk and wheeled around to aim it at them. He didn’t get the change to shoot—three Defenders fired at once, riddling the man’s unarmored chest with bloody holes. The Defenders didn’t hesitate moving their aim to the other Confed personnel. It took barely over a second to waste them all.

  Kastor powered off his blazer and pointed the blade toward a hallway. “Secure the rest of the building.” He half-turned to face the double doors. “Qasim! Get in here!”

  The soft-edged Arab man shuffled in and let out a spree of hoarse coughing. He was covered from head to toe in sandy gray dust. Two of his techs followed behind. Kastor remembered there being several more before the orbital strike. They went straight for the computers. Qasim pulled some kind of keychip out of his chest pocket and plugged it into a computer slot.

  “Let’s hope this works like it’s supposed to,” he muttered.

  Kastor sheathed his sword over his shoulder as a handful more Defenders filed in. One leaned against a wall and slid down to his haunches, holding his rifle with one hand like a walking stick and staring off at nothing, wide eyed. A few others took a knee beside him and caught their breath. They didn’t speak, didn’t look at each other, only stared, trying to comprehend what had just happened to them and their comrades. Kastor’s thirty-six Defenders had been reduced to eleven—fourteen including Qasim and his techs. Three posted at the front entrance, two on the roof, three securing the rest of the building, and three here in the room, gripped by the thousand yard stare.

  Kastor thought about ordering them up to the roof or to the main entrance, but decided to let his pity on them prevail. Perhaps he was getting soft. Perhaps the splitting pain in his shoulder had something to do with it. He gingerly touched the edges of the bloody mess.

  “You used to work in this building, didn’t you Qasim?” he asked.

  “Uh, yes,” the head tech replied in a raspy voice, distracted by the computer screen he was hunched over.

  The other two techs had gone around to the other side of the row of cubicles.

  “You know where I could find a pair of narrow nose pliers?” Kastor asked.

  Qasim looked up at one of his techs. “Omar. You have the backpack?”

  Omar nodded back.

  “Narrow nose pliers,” Qasim said, jerking his head toward Kastor.

  Omar slung his backpack onto the desk and dug through it a minute, eventually producing a pair of pliers with worn, rubber handles. He tossed them across the low cubicle barrier. Kastor caught them with his right hand, then stepped to a swivel chair and slumped into it. He got a firm grip on the pliers and scrutinized his wound again. Needed to keep his mind off the pain.

  “Can you get in, Qasim?”

  Qasim didn’t reply at first, his hands alternating between quick typing and finger-swiping across the touchscreen. Jaw slack, breaths wheezing in and out. Eyes flitting back and forth behind his smudged glasses, divining the data readout.

  “They tried to delete the software that controls the Bastion,” he said without looking away. “Their servers are being auto-wiped. All files are deleting. I can’t stop all of it. Only a few files at a time.”

  “They don’t want intel falling into the Defenders’ hands,” Kastor said. “Just focus on the Bastion. Nothing else matters right now.”

  “I’m trying,” Qasim muttered absently.

  Kastor made a fist with his left hand and pushed the pliers into the hole in his shoulder. Acute, excruciating pain followed as he wriggled the narrow metal prongs through torn muscle tissue. He had to get the damn thing out before his muscle and skin healed over it, but his right hand—and thus the pliers—began to tremble from the pain. He clenched his teeth and grunted as he worked the pliers through the last piece of flesh to get to something solid. The bullet didn’t move when touched, but a bone-deep jolt of pain swept down his arm. Must’ve been lodged in the humerus. That brought a bit of relief. His clavicle had fractured once at academy. It took weeks to recover. He’d only wish that pain and annoyance on a few depraved souls in this galaxy.

  He growled opening the pliers enough to pinch the embedded foreign object. A few times, the pliers slipped off the bullet, sending shooting pain across his shoulder and arm. Qasim glanced over at him, grimaced, and returned to his work at the computer. Kastor closed his eyes hard for a second, then opened them and blinked away the mistiness. He pinched the prongs around the bullet with a hard but shaky-handed grip and drew in a breath. Held it.

  Pulled. At first, the bullet held, but he kept a firm grasp of the rubber handles and pulled harder. It loosened. He wiggled the pliers up and down, then side to side. The bullet popped out with a crack, and the pliers yanked away, holding the little bloody, lead bastard between the prongs. Kastor doubled over in sweeping pain. His shoulder throbbed. His teeth and jaw hurt from clamping down so hard. A iron-like taste filled his mouth.

  But when he sat back, he felt relieved. That needed to happen. He turned over the smashed, blood-slicked bullet in the pliers, then tossed them onto the closest desk.

  Kastor turned on his cuff’s map projector and aimed it at the carpeted floor. The image automatically adjusted to account for the angle of the surface. It was a map of Jerusalem that updated every few seconds Every Defender team leader had a tracker that showed up as a blinking blue dot on the bird’s eye view map. Several sizable gaps had formed between team leaders at their outer perimeter, and some had retreated back ten or so blocks. The orbital strikes must’ve decimated their outer lines, which meant, once the strikes silenced, a hard push of Confed ground forces toward the Old City would ensue soon.

  Kastor switched over to the cuff’s communications function and brought up his private channel with Siraj.

  “Siraj, are you there?” He waited a few seconds. “Siraj, respond if you can hear me.”

  Shit. Kastor hadn’t thought through the potentiality of losing Siraj. None of the other Defenders held so much sway as him.

  A wave of relief washed over him when the audio crackled.

  “I’m here,” Siraj said between heavy breaths, gunshots popping in the background. “We made a push for the Temple Mount to get away from the orbital strikes. Lost a lot of fighters. They bombarded the Old City! TheOld City!”

  “I know,” Kastor said into his cuff. “We got some of it, too. Siraj, listen to me. I need you to radio your teams on the outer perimeter. Tell them theycannot allow the Confed to break through. They need to hold the line.”

  “Were they bombarded also?” A spree of gunshots crackled behind his voice.

  Kastor hesitated. “Yes.” No point in keeping it from him. “But we’ve taken the OCSS and I’ve got Qasim working on taking control of the Bastion. We’ll have it soon.”

  Qasim let out a heavy sigh and wiped the dust-laced sweat from his brow.

  “Are you sure?” Siraj a
sked.

  Kastor’s eyes flicked up to Qasim. He decided not to ask.

  “Yes,” Kastor answered. “Radio your teams. Tell them to expect a ground attack as soon as the bombardment cuts off. The Confed is going to—”

  An explosion from one of the rooms down the hallway interrupted his train of thought. Kastor listened, thought. Qasim and his techs had stopped working and exchanged glances with each other and Kastor.

  “I have to go,” Kastor said into his cuff, then cut off the comm link.

  He pushed up from his chair and snapped at the three fighters that had been resting.

  “You three, up. On me.”

  Faces alert, they rushed to comply, following their Advisor. Kastor drew his handgun and crept into the hallway, lined with closed office doors. Each one had a single, slender window above the door handle. Kastor took slow, quiet steps down the hall, sticking close to the wall and checking each door window to see if anything looked awry in the office. His Defenders came along behind him, combat rifles up, staring down the hallway with wide eyes. A third of the way down, Kastor had found nothing.

  He heard a clicking sound from a few offices down. Its door eased just barely open and stayed. Smoke wafted out of the room into the hallway. Kastor and the Defenders aimed their weapons. Waited.

  Nothing. They waited with weapons up for the better part of a minute. Kastor glanced at one of the Defenders and tilted his head to command him to move up. The thirty-something man swallowed, sweating, and crept forward, keeping his weapon on the office door. Several soft, wary steps later, he kept hold of his gun with one hand and reached toward the door handle with the other.

  The moment his fingers touched it, the door exploded outward toward him, splintering it and blasting the Defender backwards into the wall behind him. A figure wasted no time jumping out of the office into the veil of trapped smoke. Kastor pressed himself against the wall as guns fired—both from the Defenders and from their mysterious attacker. A muzzle flashed twice, and both the other Defenders grunted with hits and recoiled backward.