Edward’s scream pierced the darkness.
The red eyes disappeared when Jesse turned around. “What was it?” he asked, pointing the camera out into the darkness.
“Monster,” Colin answered, his voice breaking. “Monster!”
“Yeah, what he said,” Edward agreed.
A rock cracked against a wall behind them, all three guys jumped.
“They are trying to SCARE us!” Jesse argued. “If they wanted to hurt us, they would have… FUCKING OW!” he screeched, dropping the camera as he fell to his knees holding his head, blood matting his hair.
“Way to go, brainiac!” Edward told his friend.
A deep voice surrounded them, reverberating from the walls as it cut into their conversation, “I think we have us some supper, boys.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
Heckscher State Park area, NY, USA
Tabitha didn’t wait to see if they had missed another hidden gun. She reached into her jacket and threw out her four globes.
“Achronyx, seek and find all metal within a quarter mile, feed to my HUD,” she said. She turned and looked to her left. According to the new Xs listed inside her goggles, she had four new combatants heading toward her from the north.
Tabitha dialed her gun up to eight. Unlike some of the others, it was damned painful for her to shoot her pistol cranked too high, but for this eight should be sufficient. “Place aiming reticule on gunsight and approaching targets.”
Four targets, green squares, showed up on top of the foliage that she couldn’t see through. Tabitha started firing in bursts of two rods at a time.
—
“We have—” Sergeant Daniel Gallium was looking at his number two, Brian Fader, to direct him and his partner Kerry Pollard when, in front of his eyes, Brian Fader was violently blown back, blood spraying out behind him. Daniel hit the ground and crawled towards Brian’s body when Kerry Pollard screamed in pain. He turned to see Kerry’s arm hanging by just a piece of ligament before his head exploded and his body dropped.
“GET DOWN, GET DOWN!” Daniel yelled to his partner, Robert Rojas, hoping that whoever had targeted them couldn’t get a bead on them this low to the ground.
He finished crawling over to Brian and gritted his teeth.
Brian had been wearing the same chest protection Daniel had on.
And it hadn’t done him a damn bit of good.
—
Two down, their squares turning red before slowly fading. The other two were hugging the ground trying to stay out of her fire.
She doubted it would do any good if she cared to fight. But, for now, they were out of it and Tabitha ran back towards her first location. Thirty red squares must have been behind her when she dropped down into the facility, and they were approaching quickly.
—
“Fucking hit me with a .50 caliber? Screw the grenades!” John bitched. He stomped towards the building, and cranking up his pistols to ten, he started blowing holes into the walls ahead of him.
—
The operations room was tense. The inside fire alarm had just been shut off, and no known fire had occurred. But that meant they had at least one if not more enemies inside the building. Vic had ordered sweeps to interdict any internal enemies.
Externally, they lost the female. Then, machine gun placement one went offline, and they could tell from an external video monitor it was blown the fuck up.
Now, he had one four-man squad, half of the team dead, and the other half on the ground trying to figure out who had shot them.
Plus, one black armored asshole was shrugging off their weapons as he stomped towards the building, blowing fist-sized holes into the Perma-crete.
And Vic had just learned that the air cover he had expected was stuck on the fucking ground. No one could raise the President to bring in additional firepower.
That had been the plan’s ace in the hole. Those above Vic had known what a hothead the President would be. Bring TQB into a fight on American soil, and the President would use everything at his disposal to retaliate.
Which wasn’t happening.
“Give me all speakers,” Vic growled as he clicked on the microphone, his toothpick moving to the other side of his mouth.
—
Bethany Anne was about to swing around the corner and take on the two emplacements of fighters at the end of the hall when a man started speaking.
“My name,” he said, “is Vic Kingston. All personnel, cease fire. I repeat, all personnel, cease fire.”
The shots coming at her stopped immediately. If nothing else, Bethany Anne thought, his people were sharp.
Bethany Anne heard John’s shots hitting the outside walls.
Hold, John.
Yes, ma’am.
ADAM, throw me up a schematic of the building again, see where this guy is…
—
Vic took another breath before continuing, “I don’t know how you did it, but you obviously got to the President of the United States…”
Wow, I did? Bethany Anne thought to herself.
>>Yes, your Father did.<<
Oh, she smirked. Couldn’t keep his little general fingers out of the fight, huh?
>>I think he gave a Queen Bitch ultimatum if I’m not mistaken.<<
Okay.
>>And you have another audience, when you’re done here.<<
I do?
>>Yes,<<
With who?
>>The President in the White House DUCC.<<
Oh, that explains.
>>I’ll show you the video.<<
In a minute. I need to finish here first.
>>I found the operations room.<<
Show it to me. Okay, next stop…
—-
Tabitha slowed down her run when she believed the first figures were about fifty yards away. Too much brush for them to easily see her.
For her, they were varying shaded squares on her HUD. The closer the target, the brighter the green.
“Achronyx, adjust pistols for proper penetration at will. Monitor pain levels to penetration.”
“How do you want me to calculate their pain levels?”
“Not their fucking pain levels, you idiotic IBM PC Jr.,” she huffed. “My sodding pain levels. You senile abacus.”
“Calculating your pain levels to damage inflicted, ignoring illiterate descriptions for EI Achronyx.”
“Ignore them all you want, but if you fuck this up, I’ll personally kick your electronic ass, you understand me?”
“I’m calculating the maximum damage for the least power, confirming damage will take targets out of the fight.”
“Damned right,” Tabitha murmured as she started shooting. She made it to six before she needed to hide behind a tree. The sheer number of random bullets heading in her direction was impressive.
That’s when speakers from the building started blaring a command to cease fire.
—
Vic sighed, he refused to get all of his men killed, and it was evident that without support, all of his men were going to die.
—
Mission Specialist McGowan heard the boss issue the command to stand down. He wasn’t sure what he saw in all of this, or why, but he was pretty sure if they continued as they had, it was going to be a slaughter with their side eating most of the bullets.
Whoever these three were, they had brought their Pro “A” game, and what he thought was an overwhelming response from their side turned out to be only for the benchwarmers.
They were going to get fucked. He turned to sneak another peek at the boss when a woman in deep, dark red armor appeared a couple of feet from him.
Her eyes were only on Vic as she told him, “We are going for a talk!” She pushed Vic. Then they both disappeared.
“What the FUCK?” he yelped, pointing to where Vic had been just a second ago.
Etheric
Vic felt the violent shove from his right, which caught him by surprise. He tried to reach for the
chair that he was going to hit as he stumbled, only to find himself hitting the ground in a new place.
He wasn’t in the operations center anymore.
Lying on his side, his eyes adjusting to an amorphous place, light reflecting through the mist, no discernable anything.
Except for her.
“What are you trying to accomplish?” the contralto voiced woman asked him. Her helmet retracted, and her eyes were fiery red.
Like, roaring fucking bonfire red.
“You even try for your pistol, and I’ll rip your leg off and let you bleed to death out here, then I’ll go back and lay waste to everyone in the compound. You wanted this conversation, and now you got it.”
Vic licked his lips. “You her?”
“Probably.”
“Bethany Anne?”
“Yes. Don’t you have a picture of me so you recognize the person you’re looking for?”
Vic slowly pushed up to a sitting position, being careful not to make any moves towards his pistol. “We do, but not in a red suit of exo-armor with flaming red eyes.”
“That’s because I’m pissed, and you broke up a chance for me to play hooky.”
This answer caused Vic confusion, and he tried to figure it out. “You were playing hooky in body armor?”
“Only way John will let me play with the terrorists anymore,” she said.
Now, Vic was even more confused. “Am I right to think your people aren’t, right now, killing all of my men?”
“We didn’t start the fight, you gold digging fuckwit,” she said, “but we sure as hell can finish it.”
Vic nodded. “I got that. I don’t need all my men killed. This operation went bust when you did whatever it was to keep the President out of the loop.”
She raised an eyebrow at him, her voice going velvet over steel. “Tell me more.”
He shrugged. “What is there to tell? This is a deep-black operation to get technology from TQB before you leave the solar system.”
“This is a smash and grab?”
He nodded.
“How many out there are mercenaries?”
“Maybe a quarter. All of the external fighters. My backups are all black ops.”
“Why?”
“To gain TQB technology…” he explained before she cut him off a second time.
“No, I have that. Why are you using black ops?” she asked.
“We can deny involvement at the top. This operation was to get the White House to react and then pin you between a rock and a hard place.”
“You, your boss, your boss’s boss and that cunt nugget in the White House are idiots. There is only the Earth, and a rock I drop on your asses. THAT is being between a rock and a hard place. I said no technology. Interestingly enough when I say that, it fucking means NO TECHNOLOGY.”
The helmet started assembling itself around her face again. “Any questions about what that means now?”
Vic shook his head.
Her voice came out of a speaker on her armor, “We’re going back to your operations center. My Ranger is coming in to grab Monica, who you will have your men bring up to us, and then we are all leaving. If another person so much as sneezes in the wrong direction, I’ll start dropping rocks around the fucking United States. Not that you will care personally at that time, you understand?”
Vic nodded his head, he not only understood her threat, but he understood that his boss and the boss above them didn’t have a fucking clue who they were dealing with.
She wasn’t the pushover he was told she would be.
She waved her hand. “Now get up, let’s get this going. I already have another fucking appointment I have to keep.”
Vic got up, a burning question in his mind he absolutely wasn’t going to ask.
Who plays hooky with terrorists?
—
In New Jersey, the alien spaceship sitting on top of the Air Force runways slowly faded from view, causing some, who had been filming the event, to assume it was a great, big holographic hoax.
—
The faint lights from so many cell phones gave the DUCC under the White House an eerie glow. It had been twenty-seven minutes since almost everything had been shut down.
Except the air conditioning, thank God.
At first, it had been a mess of people calling out, talking, yelling and crying when all of the lights went out. Since those first five minutes, a few calmer minds started putting together the clues.
One, Bethany Anne was his daughter. No wonder he moved to their side.
Two, they didn’t think a retired US Army general would play around with the fact that she would be willing to kill people. The whole life insurance comment got a few of them thinking it answered more than a couple of questions about her.
Three, don’t be arrogant. More than a couple of people covertly aimed their eyes toward the President. He wasn’t known for being very humble. One staffer, if she admitted it at all to herself, was hoping that pompous ass would say the wrong thing.
Four, how the hell had the Etheric Empire subverted all of their equipment? Right now, the doors were locked. They could hear people on the other side of the doors trying to figure out ways to get in.
Five… They never got to discuss five.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
Dulce, New Mexico, USA
Annette watched as three more men lowered themselves into the hole with ropes. Aina wanted to follow, but when asked if she had rope training, she had to admit she did not.
Both women had to make do with staying above.
Over the next three hours, Annette knew two things positively.
Aina wasn’t going to get fired for lack of results, which was rather important to Annette.
The second was most of the good and easy to find information had already been taken. All computers had been removed or destroyed. There were enough hints to know that something had been going on, but they had no details.
Those below reported there was blood everywhere, body parts, and frankly it was a mess, with horrible smells.
There were dead bodies on multiple floors, as they made it down staircases, and there were elevator shafts that were filled in. It could take weeks or years to pull out all of the rock. More than likely, they would try to figure out where they went, and drill in from another direction.
Annette set up a perimeter outside and she now considered this a secured military operation. They had enough clues, now they needed harder proof.
She looked around and sighed, seeing where this knowledge was going to go on the military side. Annette wanted to figure out how she could make sure that her ass wasn’t assigned to this detail for who knew how many godforsaken years.
Aina, however, had that look on her face that made Annette believe she wanted to move in and stick her toothbrush in the nearest bathroom down below.
This base was her new boyfriend.
—
Edward ran, stumbling, falling and banging his knee painfully when he tripped over a rock.
Soon, he heard Colin yell at him, “Slow down! You’re going the wrong way.” Edward had just enough logic still firing in his mind to understand the scary shit behind him was a probable death sentence, the scary shit of getting lost in these caves, was an absolute death sentence.
Edward stopped and turned to see Colin’s light about a third of the way away from the UFOs, coming in his direction. Jesse, behind Colin, was screaming with anger that none of this was real.
Edward struggled to get himself to move back towards Jesse where the scary voices had panicked the shit out of him when Colin caught up.
“Dammit! You should know better than to freak out and run off in a cave system!” Colin grabbed Edward’s arm and shook him, his concern for his friend fueling his anger on top of the desire to run out of the caves himself.
“Have you ever,” Edward asked, allowing himself to take direction from Colin, “had voices talk about eating you?” He gasped, starting to feel the pain from
his fall a minute before.
Colin looked around at the tall stalagmites rising from the floor, wondering which cave dwellers would jump out from behind one to eat of them. “Reminds me of the Dungeons and Dragons Tomb of Horrors.”
The Kurtherian Gambit Omnibus 05 - The Fans Version: My Ride is a Bitch - Don't Cross This Line - Never Submit Page 72