Last Man Out (Poor Man's Fight Book 5)

by Elliott Kay

  Better company awaited her in the open plaza around the office tower. Her dark grey airvan sat between ground vehicles along the curb, looking almost like part of a natural civilian setting. The airvan was designed for a low profile that belied its effective armor and high performance systems. Were it not for grey fatigues and sidearms of her companions lounging outside the airvan, no one would know it from a civilian model.

  Captain Ellis Conroy held the official spot as her aide, though she preferred keeping the tall, wiry black officer close for his tactical experience more than his administrative skills. Sergeants Steve Brody and Malai Juntasa held much the same level of her trust. Precision Solutions used rank to convey authority and seniority, but largely ignored the traditional trappings of etiquette. Some of Dylan’s confidants were mere corporals.

  “How’d it go?” asked Conroy. “Any news?”

  Dylan glanced up and down the street before she spoke. People in business wear strolled by at a casual pace. Shops, restaurants, and smaller offices filled the plaza, all of them in place to serve the needs of the thousands employed at Minos Enterprises’ headquarters complex and the surrounding residence towers. From here, Minos looked as nice as almost any other developed world in the Union.

  Somehow it didn’t make her feel more secure. “We’ll talk in the air,” she said.

  Everyone took her cue. Brody patted the main passenger door with his palm, opening up the compartment before he walked around to the pilot’s side. Juntasa took the passenger seat only after Dylan and Conroy got in the back and the overhead engines hummed to life.

  As it happened, Dylan found something to talk about before they lifted off. A handful of dark bottles sat on the small console bisecting the front and rear passenger seats. Their label matched one of the businesses across the street. “Is this beer?” she asked.

  “I took a walk over to the bar to kill some time,” Brody explained. “The bartender offered up drinks as soon as I came through the door. ‘On the house,’ he said. ‘Want to show support.’ I hardly said a thing.”

  Dylan peered through the windows, this time looking for others in Precision Solutions uniforms. “Somebody’s getting sloppy.”

  “Or effective,” Juntasa chuckled.

  “If our people make their own little arrangements with the neighbors, that’s on them,” said Dylan. “It shouldn’t get to the point where people throw ‘gifts’ at us out of reflex.”

  “You don’t think they’re grateful for our protection?” snorted Conroy.

  “I think somebody on this block is leaning on the locals too hard.” It didn’t stop her from taking up a bottle and popping the cap. As she expected, the bottle was still cold. The beer wasn’t bad, either. At least the local protection racket extorted the good stuff.

  With Brody settled behind the controls, the antigrav generators kicked in and the vehicle lifted off from the street. Its passengers felt hardly a thing. Within seconds, they rose over the rooftops surrounding the main office towers. Anchorside sprawled out beyond, stretching a good twenty kilometers in every direction.

  Large houses and greenery dotted the hillsides in the distance. Between here and there, however, most buildings were smaller and more compact. Aside from a handful of other Minos Enterprises offices, some dense apartment towers and the hospital, few buildings stood more than three stories tall. Outside the Compound, fully-built homes and stores were far outnumbered by makeshift shacks.

  Dylan caught sight of the Compound walls as Brody flew over. She snorted at the sight. Even in the slums, one could steal or build enough of a ladder to clear a mere fifteen-foot barrier. A common infantry laser rifle would blast through simple concrete. Dylan could think of pistols that would do the job. The wall only funneled traffic and prevented mass protests in the streets of the company headquarters. She wondered how much even that mattered. The company had already ignored mass protests elsewhere in the city.

  The outskirts of Anchorside had walls, too. Allegedly, they controlled the blowing desert sands. Most of the populace saw them as a reminder of their plight.

  “Nguyen says his platoon aced their practice runs for the raids tonight,” said Conroy. “Acker sounds like his guys almost have it down, too. We should be all set.”

  “They might want to rework it after I talk to them,” grumbled Dylan. “Geisler pulled me aside. He says no explosives, no air power. Nothing flashy.”

  “Because we’ve been doing so much of that up until now?” Conroy asked.

  “What if the other side pulls something explosive? Is he gonna blame us?” put in Brody.

  “He says he understands we can’t dictate what weapons the other side uses, but I’d bet he’ll forget about that if anything serious happens. He’s getting shareholder pressure. I think they’re worried about looking like an oppressive force.”

  “Was he worried about public relations when he had us use sonics against the last protest?” asked Juntasa. “We had people crawling around vomiting in the streets with all that noise.”

  “He called that a non-lethal measure in the face of escalating protest. All we need for a situation like that is some muddy waters. If they see us firing lasers from an aerial unit down into the city, it’s going to look like we’re the ones escalating. Harder to pin that on the other side when they’re not in a real position to shoot back.”

  “And if they are in a position to shoot back?” Conroy pressed. “It’s not impossible to take one of these things down from the ground. You know that.”

  “Hell, I’ve done it myself, Conroy. But there’s what I know and there’s what civilians see and understand on the news. Especially through the underground outlets. We need to shut those down.” Dylan frowned. “None of that is new, though. Geisler didn’t care before. I wonder what changed.”

  “You think it was the spaceport hit during the last storm?” suggested Conroy.

  “Maybe. That did some damage, at least. Cost us some people, too. Maybe he’s worried this is all getting out of control.”

  “It is getting out of control,” noted Brody.

  “Yeah. Tell me about it.”

  “Well, this might be timely,” said Conroy. “Dhambri shot me a message while you were in the meeting. Told me to let him know when you were out. Guess he’s got something to share that he didn’t want hitting your holocom while you were in the building.”

  “Shit, why didn’t you tell me?” Dylan asked, already calling up a floating screen for her message program.

  “He said it was sensitive, not urgent. Didn’t want to risk having it picked up in the corporate HQ. Your holocom isn’t as stocked with crypto as the airvan.”

  The screen in front of Dylan flashed once, quickly creating a live image of her best signals tech. Electronics gear and hard-screen computers surrounded him in the communications center. “Dhambri, what’s going on?”

  “See for yourself, boss,” he replied. Whatever button he touched off-screen sent a notification buzz through her holocom. “And before you ask, I’m sure I didn’t leave any tracks.”

  A new message appeared on her index, labeled with the alphanumeric code her company used for sensitive materials. Dylan opened up the file to find a string of Geisler’s mail.

  “The batch is pretty shallow, unfortunately,” said Dhambri. “It looks like his system routinely sweeps everything up and moves it to a different memory host. I’ve only got traffic from the last week or two.”

  Dylan hardly listened, consumed as she was by her eager perusal. She disregarded standard reports, updates, and other formalities. Many messages only copied him in on matters rather than going to him directly. Some of the traffic included Dylan herself.

  The standardized nature of so much of his mail made it easy to spot more personal messages. Those she opened right away. Conversation in the airvan dropped off as Dylan’s eyes moved from left to right. “Son of a bitch,” she muttered.

  “Anything you can share?” asked Conroy.

  “Geisler�
��s worried about a corporate coup,” Dylan explained. “He’s getting warnings from a couple of friendly people on the board of directors. Nobody’s happy. People are losing their patience. I can’t tell if they want to replace Geisler or if they’re sniffing around for a buyout of the whole company, but he’s nervous.

  “That explains his attitude lately and his cold feet about how we handle our job. He wants to keep things steady while he fights this off. Aw hell, and that new guy!” Dylan groaned as she put more elements together. “There was a guy in the briefing today asking about our approach to raids. He must be somebody’s watchdog.”

  “All this over how we handle an insurgency?” asked Brody from the pilot’s seat. “It’s not like we’re the ones who have these people angry in the first place. We didn’t fall through on housing and jobs and all that shit.”

  “No, but the fighting draws attention to all the other problems,” said Dylan. “It all still comes down to the eggheads figuring out how to industrialize the rocks here, but you can’t browbeat science into working faster. The people with the money are getting antsy, though, and they’ve gotta take that out on somebody.”

  “Kinda like the insurgents take their anger out on us?”

  “They take it out on us ‘cause we’re between them and the people they’re actually mad at,” said Dylan. “That’s the job.”

  Her eyes turned to the window. Past Anchorside’s outer walls, the landscape held low scrub and grass, but beyond that lay grey, ash-laden desert. Black, jagged mountains rose on the horizon, the only part of the planet’s land masses not covered in ash when the first probes arrived.

  Much of the planet’s surface had been terraformed into viable soil hosting everything from vital bacteria to trees since then. The initial successes of crystal mining and chip processing kept Minos Enterprises going, but the mountains and the dark grey rocks of Minos held the greatest promise. The stone’s resilience against heat and its ability to absorb such a wide band of signals would revolutionize any number of industries… once the scientists and engineers could figure out how to work with it all.

  When that happened, everything would change. Settlers would stop complaining about a lack of work and money. They might shift to other complaints, but how many people ever rioted over having too many job opportunities?

  A sharp whoosh interrupted her thoughts, streaking past the airvan’s wing in a line of white smoke from the ground. A second shot exploded beside the airvan’s wing, tearing apart one turbine and peppering the armored hull with shrapnel.

  “Ground fire!” Dylan warned as alarms blared and the world around the airvan spun.

  Brody fought at the controls to keep the airvan straight and level, relying heavily on the antigrav generators to slow their descent. He couldn’t pull any evasive maneuvers with the vehicle in this condition. Landing in anything short of a fatal crash would be miracle enough.

  Dylan’s stomach lurched, notifying her of the emergency artificial gravity systems kicking on. She threw her head and shoulders back against her cushioned seat and waited. It didn’t take long. The jarring impact hit her all over, resounding worst in her head as such things always did. After a lifetime of rough incidents, though, she knew how to handle this one without missing a beat. “Are we okay?” she asked.

  “I’m good,” announced Conroy by her side.

  “Okay,” said Juntasa.

  “We’re alive,” reported Brody. She could already see him shutting down systems before anything else popped or caught fire.

  Another quick glance gave her some small sense of her bearings. They’d landed on a rooftop, which offered both benefits and drawbacks—the worst of the latter being their exposure. Dylan didn’t trust the airvan’s armor to protect them now. “Get out and take up compass positions,” she ordered, pulling a rifle from its mount on the seat in front of her. “Watch for a target. I’m on south. Go.”

  Dylan popped the side door open and rolled out, throwing herself flat on the deck. The rooftop provided only a slight concrete lip at its edge. Alarmed voices from the streets below drifted through the ringing in her ears

  Similar rooftops stretched all around. With so many ramshackle dwellings built one on top of another, the scenery offered a lot of camouflage. She turned her eyes skyward, searching for smoke or chemical trails, and found a single drifting line reaching to the sky from a single humble balcony.

  “Targeting. Magnify,” she demanded, drawing a bead on the rooftop. The scope on her rifle filled up with an image of the shooters. She saw three of them, one woman and two men judging by their shape, though all of them wore hoods and masks. One man held the missile launcher while the woman spotted for him.

  “Target human male with launcher,” Dylan ordered, though she didn’t wait for the computer. If the assistance made a difference, so be it. The guy with the launcher looked about ready to fire again. They all but stared directly at one another through their scopes.

  Her first shot burned through his shoulder with a fierce red light. Her second, coming without pause, cut through him again as he lurched to one side in pain. His companions dropped before she could tag either of them.

  “Boss, have you got something?” grunted Juntasa.

  “Yes!” Dylan reported. She missed her next shot, firing too fast in an attempt to catch moving targets at distance. Nobody on the balcony looked ready to fire back, though. The others would be at her side in seconds, too. She didn’t need to listen for their footsteps or wait on their aid. Dylan forced herself to take her time and aim. Better to do this right than rush it.

  * * *

  Chen Lau ran through cramped hallways and up even more cramped stairways, heedless of noise or the slight give and shift of the flooring under his feet. He couldn’t afford to waste time being delicate now. He had to move.

  Stupid, stupid kids, Chen thought. He rounded a corner and blew past some resident poking her head out of her door. What the fuck are they doing? What are they thinking?

  “Where the hell are they?” he asked out loud the top of the next makeshift flight of stairs. It was practically a ladder. Daylight slipped through the cracks between modular dwellings and slapped-together shacks in the maze, providing the only illumination. It wasn’t much of a guide. Not many residents here put their names or numbers up on their doors.

  Red beams of light cut through the walls of the hallway up ahead. He couldn’t tell which direction they traveled, but the scream and shout that followed the laser blasts helped.

  Though the lasers cut straight through the walls, Chen moved in at full speed and wrenched the door open. It wasn’t locked. He found a tiny living room and a kitchen, probably comprising most of the resident’s worldly possessions, along with a newly-ventilated door to a balcony. Chen crossed the distance in four steps, pulling the only truly useful tool he had for this situation from a pocket under his light, ragged coat.

  Three people lay on the deck behind a makeshift railing of discarded pipes and boards. Two of them still moved. “Stay down!” he shouted, letting the chaff grenade fall forward even as he flung himself to the ground with them. The device let out a cloud of smoke and sparks with accompanying pops and squeals, all of it loud enough to be painful at such close proximity. Chen figured it had to be less painful than being shot.

  “Quan is hit!” Robbie shouted over the racket. He reached over to the fallen young man, tugging away his jacket to look at the chest wound. Ellen crawled over, too, looking for some way to help.

  Sparks fell across Chen’s head and shoulders. He ignored it all, reaching the hurt young man on the deck amid showering bits of hot, loosened roofing. Only then did he notice the barrage of lasers cutting through the air above and around them. “We have to move,” Chen ordered. “Drag him inside. Now!”

  * * *

  The chaff rendered Dylan’s scope useless. She fired into the cloud and hoped for the best.

  A small barrage of lasers joined hers from the two men and one woman now at her sid
e. Red beams of light cut into the cloud and the structure around it. If they did any harm to the people on that balcony, she couldn’t tell from here.

  “Cease fire,” Dylan grunted. “We don’t have targets now. No sense being reckless. Watch the rest of the skyline and the neighborhood. They might not be alone.”

  “I didn’t see anything on my side of the roof,” said Conroy.

  “Ordinary assholes coming out to look at us over on mine,” said Brody.

  “Maybe we should shoot them, too,” Juntasa fumed.

  “Don’t,” snapped Dylan. She got hold of her temper again. Juntasa didn’t mean anything by it. Everyone knew that. “Stay cool. Keep it down, too. We’re being watched.”

  “Yeah,” sighed Juntasa. “I hear you. Did you get any of them?”

  “The one with the launcher, at least,” said Dylan. Her holocom buzzed at her wrist. She knew the others were getting the same. By now her people had noticed the airvan had gone down. She didn’t see any other aircraft on the horizon yet. Though she’d have appreciated some air cover right now, it was probably for the best.

  “Command, this is Dylan,” she answered before letting whoever was on the other end speak. “We’re grounded. Zero casualties. We exchanged fire with hostiles but they have broken contact. Myself, Conroy, Juntasa, and Brody all accounted for at my location.”

  “Understood, Major,” said whatever signals tech had the line. “Help is on the way. Glad you’re all okay. Do you have a location for the targets?”

  “Sending the data from my rifle now,” she said, calling up a holo screen from her weapon. “They dropped a chaff grenade and ran as soon as we returned fire. We could narrow it down to a few blocks, maybe.”

  “What the hell,” said Juntasa. “Toss the whole neighborhood.”

  Dylan stood up straight. If nobody else had fired on them by now, it wasn’t going to happen. The missile crew was doubtlessly occupied with their getaway.