by Mel Odom
Knowing his defensive position had been compromised, Sage yelled a warning to Kiwanuka and sprinted toward the sliding crawler. The passenger got caught under the vehicle and was reduced to meat jelly despite his armor. The other two attackers riding in the rear of the open vehicle hit the ground and tried to stay ahead of it.
Sage shot one of the men at almost point-blank range, knocking him from his feet and leaving him easy prey for the oncoming vehicle. On the run, Sage intercepted the only other attacker on his feet, yanked the grenade launcher from the frightened man’s grip, and kicked his opponent’s feet out from under him.
Whirling, slinging the Roley over his shoulder, Sage dodged the oncoming crawler by centimeters and stepped into the trailing dust cloud, counting on it for a moment of disguise. He shifted through the HUD’s display, tied in his optics to ParaSight 02’s vid signal, and took aim with his newly appropriated grenade launcher. He rapidly pumped two blobs of gel explosive into the knot of men taking cover inside a building fronting the well house forty meters away.
The resulting explosions ripped the attackers and the building to pieces as the skidding crawler smashed one of the well house’s supports. The insect cover and the tapestry of spider webs came apart in a rush. Kiwanuka managed to get away from the avalanche of rock and ripped vines.
“Sergeant Sage, this is Blue Leader,” a crisp voice called over the comm. “Be advised that you have aerial support at your twenty.”
Glancing up at the sky as the dust thinned around him, Sage spotted the unmistakable shapes of two jumpcopters screaming toward him.
“Roger that, Blue Leader. Do you have eyes on Sergeant Kiwanuka and me?” Sage took cover behind the overturned crawler and reached for a resupply pack for the grenade launcher. Taking advantage of the lull in action, he fed the ammunition into the weapon’s reservoir.
“We do. Can you mark our targets?”
“I can.” Sage accessed the ParaSights and fed the information through to the jumpcopters.
“Thank you. Take a breather, Top, and let us do the heavy lifting.”
By the time Sage was reloaded, the lead jumpcopter swooped out of the sky and opened up with the heavy particle blasters mounted on the stubby wings. The searing burst caught another group of attackers and punched them into the ground. None of them lived through the assault. Broken bodies littered the wreckage of the building where they’d hidden.
The survivors chose to break off the attack at that time. Even then, snipers aboard the jumpcopters and Kiwanuka managed to take down stragglers.
A moment later, a jumpcopter hovered over Sage. One of the crew tossed out a line. The other jumpcopter did the same for Kiwanuka. Sage stepped into the loop at the bottom of the line and held on with his free hand as he fisted the Roley in his other hand. Kiwanuka did the same.
“Ready.” Sage braced himself, then strained to hold on as the jumpcopter’s cargo line reeled in. Holding onto the line, he spun dizzily as he shot up to the waiting aircraft.
Hands grabbed him and hauled him aboard. Getting his feet under him, Sage whirled around and searched for the second jumpcopter. In the other jumpcopter, Kiwanuka got to her feet and reached for the overhead support.
The cargomaster opened his comm. “All good back here.”
“Roger that.” The jumpcopter pilot spun the aircraft around and headed back toward Fort York.
Gazing down through the open cargo doors, Sage studied the battlefield that had taken shape throughout the heart of the sprawl. The well house stood in spite of the damage it had taken, but several of the jeweled webs were burning. A few of the Makaum people hesitantly left their shelter and ran for the well house with buckets. In seconds, they were sloshing water over the flames and forming lines for a bucket brigade to the buildings that had caught on fire. Smoke curled up into the air and wafted in through the cargo door.
Sage opened a channel to Fort York. “Colonel, are you there?”
“I am.” Halladay sounded grim.
“These people need help putting the fires out. Maybe we could—”
“Negative, Top. If we send out vehicles against an enemy that we haven’t fully ascertained—”
“It was DawnStar, sir.”
Halladay ignored the response. “—then all we’re going to do is send up targets for them to knock down. We can’t do that. Soldiers and materials are too hard to replace out here. If we were able to secure that area, the situation would be different.”
Sage knew that was true, but he still felt torn as the jumpcopter carried him back to the fort. This wasn’t what he was on Makaum to do. He’d wanted to make a difference, to fight the Phrenorians. Silently, he cursed DawnStar and whoever it had been that had made the decision to kill him and Kiwanuka this morning.
0807 Hours Zulu Time
Jahup grabbed the wooden bucket that was handed to him, dunked it into the cistern to fill it, then passed it back off to the second line. The buckets came in on one line, then passed back to the fires along another. Jahup was soaked and cold from the well water, and his boots were filled. His back and shoulders were starting to ache from the constant, rapid motion.
He grabbed another bucket, dunked it, felt the cold water swirl around his hands, and lifted it to pass to the man in the second line. He tried not to think about the black clouds that filled the sky above the market. Buildings were lost. Goods were lost.
Lives were lost.
He had seen the dead dragged out into the street so the bodies didn’t burn with the buildings. He had dragged four of them himself. One of them had been a small girl, surely no older than his little sister. He couldn’t imagine that happening to Telilu.
And it had all happened so fast.
For a moment, his breath caught and he was looking into the dead girl’s eyes again. They were clear and glassy, empty of everything she had been.
“Jahup!” Noojin banged the empty bucket against his shoulder.
Drawn out of the waking nightmare, Jahup looked at her.
“Fill the bucket!” Angrily, Noojin thrust the bucket into his hands.
Goaded back into motion, Jahup took the bucket, dunked and filled it, and handed it off to the next man.
“Do you still think you should have involved yourself in that fight?” Noojin handed him another bucket.
Jahup didn’t answer. He knew Noojin well enough to recognize that she was looking for an argument. He gripped the bucket, slammed it into the water, felt the cold eat into his flesh again, then lifted and handed.
“If those Terran soldiers had been killed, the violence would have been ended sooner. So many of our people wouldn’t have been killed.” Noojin thrust another bucket at him.
He took it and said nothing, dunked it and handed it on.
“Those soldiers you sought to save probably started the shooting.”
“No.”
Noojin glared at him over the next bucket. “How do you know?”
“They would not have attacked so many. They were the ones who were attacked.”
“You do not know that.”
The heavyset man standing next to Jahup took the filled bucket from Jahup’s semi-numbed hands. “The Terran soldiers did not start the shooting. They were fired upon first. I saw this with my own eyes.”
Noojin glared at that man too and he stared back at her.
“I saw this.” He passed the bucket on and took the next from Jahup. “The Terrans are not all evil. The soldiers are better than the Terran corps. And I do not trust the Phrenorians.”
Silently, Jahup agreed. The Phrenorians kept to themselves and dealt harshly with anyone that got in their way. He plunged another bucket into the water.
“That sergeant, Sage, started this two nights ago when he brought that body into the club.” Noojin handed Jahup another bucket, a little too forcefully. “He begged for this fight.”
“No.” Jahup surprised himself by arguing with Noojin. He tried never to do that because he could never win an argumen
t with her. “Sage brought that body to Kos because that mercenary worked for DawnStar. Sage was standing his ground, shoving back at those who pushed him.”
“That sergeant just got here. What does he know of what’s taking place on this planet?”
Jahup thought of the sergeant’s face that night, of the pain and weariness and the anger that had been etched on it. Then he also remembered how Sage had dealt with the drug lab out in the jungle, how he had treated the dead soldiers with respect. “He knows, Noojin.”
“So you say.”
“I do.” Jahup caught the bucket that she might have been aiming for his head, and suddenly he could no longer hold in the anger and frustration that rattled around inside him. “I do say.”
“Then you are a fool.” She shoved the bucket at him and nearly knocked him from his feet.
“Stop!” The man standing beside Jahup put a heavy hand on his shoulder to steady him. He looked at Noojin. “If you are here to help, then help. If you are here to argue, go somewhere else.”
Bright tears gleamed unshed in Noojin’s eyes. For a moment Jahup thought she was going to explode in anger, but she turned without a word and walked away. She looked embarrassed, but she couldn’t deal with that either.
Jahup felt like he should go after her, but he knew that would do no good. He could help more by holding his place in line and filling the buckets.
“She is angry.” The heavyset man took the bucket that Jahup handed him.
“At me.”
“No. She is angry with what has happened to our world, at the fact that what she grew up knowing no longer holds true. She has lost some of her innocence. We all have. Things will never again be the same.” The man took another bucket and passed it along, then turned back to Jahup, who handed him another. “However, we cannot allow ourselves to stay focused on what we have lost, on how our world has changed. We must remain clearheaded as we make our next moves and save what we can of our lives, and of the lives we will hand on to our children.”
Jahup looked at the man with greater respect. “I am Jahup.”
“I know who you are. You are a scout. Your grandmother is Quass Leghef.” The man nodded and smiled. “I am Warlye, a harvester.”
“We have not met.” Jahup only knew a few of the harvesters. They stayed to themselves and fought the jungle for space to grow crops to help feed the sprawl.
“No, but I know you through your grandmother. She is a most intelligent woman.”
Jahup knew Grandmother Leghef was also obstinate and could be hard to get along with when she chose to.
Warlye looked up as he lifted the current bucket from Jahup’s hands. “Now we have the Phrenorians.”
Glancing up, shading his eyes with a hand, Jahup watched five Phrenorian aircars glide through the sky and pause above the twisting flames clinging to the roofs of the burning buildings. Moving quickly, the Phrenorian warriors tossed objects into the flames. Only seconds later, explosions went off.
White foam suddenly jetted from the doors and windows and broken walls of the buildings. The flames vanished and the twisting black smoke thinned and blew away in the breeze.
Cheers from the bucket teams suddenly filled the street.
Slowly, the aircars floated across the sprawl, trapping the fire and turning it back on itself with the fire suppression bombs. Jahup noticed two of the air cars floated higher than the other three and the Phrenorians there carried weapons or manned deck guns.
“Perhaps the Phrenorians are not so bad,” the old woman who had taken Noojin’s place said as she pulled wet hair back from her face.
Warlye shook his head in disgust as many of the Makaum people shouted their thanks to the Phrenorians. “They are fools. They do not realize they’re just pieces in the games the Phrenorians play with the others.”
The old woman straightened her bent back. “So you say, Warlye, but we must believe someone is here to help us.”
The bucket lines broke up as the people gathered to watch the Phrenorians suppress the fire.
“None of them are here to help us.” Warlye bent and swept up burned bodies of ghakingar from the ash-filled cistern water. “They are here only to help themselves.”
Knowing he was no longer needed to help put out the fires that the Phrenorians defeated so easily, Jahup walked from the cistern. He looked for Noojin, but she was nowhere to be found.
TWENTY-THREE
Special Ops Conference Room 3
Fort York
1041 Hours Zulu Time
Do you know any of these people?” Halladay stood to one side of the holo that hovered over the conference table. The colonel’s irritation was evident in the hard lines on his face, but it wasn’t directed at anyone in the room.
Standing on the other side of the table and the holo, Sage studied the five faces that hung in the air. Four of them were men and one was a woman. All of the images had been recorded during the attack by the ParaSights, and their vid records had been uploaded to Fort York’s databanks.
Sage shook his head. “I’ve never seen them before.”
“They weren’t there that night at the club?”
“I didn’t see them, sir. They might have been there. I was more concerned about Velesko Kos.”
Halladay shifted his gaze to Kiwanuka, who stood to one side of Sage, while Lieutenant Murad stood on the other. All of them gazed intently at the holo.
“No sir.” Kiwanuka shook her head. “I haven’t seen them before either.”
Halladay shoved his hand into the holo stream and gestured. The five faces spread out across the holoscape and neatly spaced columns printed out below them. Names and backgrounds glowed in green font. Two of them had long histories throughout several systems serving as mercenaries and assassins, and there were a few outstanding charges on a number of planets. As yet, there was no extradition allowed from Makaum, which made the world even more attractive to lawbreakers.
“They’re all outlaws and mercenaries,” Lieutenant Murad observed.
Halladay nodded. “Exactly the kind of people corps like DawnStar want to employ when they need to distance themselves from an illegal operation.”
Sage made himself remain calm, but that was difficult because he was ready to strike back. He’d seen the casualty lists that had run before Halladay had called up the collection of faces the intel techs had managed to get from the vids.
Seventeen Makaum people had died in the attack. Another forty-plus had been wounded. Both numbers were expected to grow as the debris was sorted through. Several buildings and goods had been lost, and that was going to leave an economic footprint in the sprawl that would take time to recover from.
“None of these people can be tied back to DawnStar?” Sage asked.
“No. Not directly.” Halladay gestured in the holo stream again. The face of the woman glowed a little brighter, and her name stood out more sharply. She had dark hair and dark eyes, and Sage knew that the unearthly beauty had come from a laser scalpel. “But we have some history on this one.”
HODGKINS, ELLEN.
WANTED FOR MURDER, BLACKMAIL, AND
TERRORIST ACTIVITY IN THE KIBUR SYSTEM.
CONTACT INTERSYSTEMS INTELLIGENCE BUREAU.
BOUNTY OFFERED BY ELDSNY CORP.
“What history?” Sage asked. He hadn’t seen the woman during the attack, but he’d seen her since in the vid files. She was sleek and deadly, no wasted effort as she’d pursued him and Kiwanuka. When the time had come to abandon the attack, she’d thrown down her weapons and promptly disappeared inside a nearby building. Since the military drones hadn’t picked her up again, she’d probably been wearing a change of clothing under her hardsuit. Once she’d shed the hardsuit, she was just another person on the street.
Halladay gestured again and more information scrolled under Ellen Hodkins’s face. “She’s worked for Velesko Kos prior to her appearance here. They were strikebreakers for Domanska Mining Corp in the Awver system. Some of those communities that
DMC rode roughshod over still have bounties offered on Kos and Hodgkins. The situation there got pretty bloody. A lot of innocent people were killed.”
The strike had made news that Sage had seen. By the time it was settled, DMC had gotten all the concessions they’d wanted and were still in the process of picking the planet clean.
“Will that connection be enough to go after Kos?” Sage asked.
“We can chase Hodgkins, provided we can find her, but we can’t prove that Kos was behind the attack on you and Sergeant Kiwanuka,” Halladay replied. “Command isn’t comfortable with acting aggressively on the soft intel that we have at the moment, and the diplomacy teams are dead set against any kind of action in the sprawl again. I’ve got people who are running the intel down, hoping to improve what we have.”
“Then we’re going to just be targets for DawnStar’s bashhounds and mercs?” Kiwanuka’s displeasure was evident, just barely a notch down from insubordinate.
Halladay gave a thin smile. “No, Sergeant. I don’t have to tell you that the general wasn’t happy with this turn of events. He doesn’t want the fort or its personnel causing any kind of diplomatic kerfuffle, but he’s not going to let his soldiers be attacked without striking back, and he’s not going to wear a black eye over strained diplomatic relations. General Whitcomb knows this strike was designed to elicit the effect it has. He’s working through channels to do damage control.” He paused. “We’re going to be cutting back on our presence in the sprawl, keeping closer to home to keep our people safe, but”—he smiled—“that leaves all of the jungle open for us. We’re still going to police those areas and take down the illegal lab operations we find out there. We’re going to hit them where they’ll feel it most: in their illegal-profits bottom line. If you’re still interested.”
“Yes sir,” Lieutenant Murad responded, but he didn’t look as confident as he had yesterday.
Sage folded his arms. “Out in the brush, we’re not going to run the risk of civilian casualties. We can better control what goes on at those sites.”