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

by Elliott Kay

  Flakes of ash fell steadily. Fires and beam weapons still provided the only real lights over the city. The wall wasn’t far now. “I thought we’d run into trouble before now,” said Tanner.

  The man beside him scowled. “We don’t need to borrow more than we’ve got,” said Chen.

  “Sorry. Guess in my experience it doesn’t matter if you predict shit or not. Once everything goes to hell it seems like it only gets worse.”

  “You don’t need to tell me. I’ve lived on Minos for decades.”

  “Why’d you come?” asked Tanner. “You weren’t born here, right?”

  “No.” Chen frowned. “I was drowning in debt. Couldn’t get ahead on any of it. Every year it only got harder and harder. The only way to earn more money as a teacher was to level up my credentials or my degrees, which meant even more work and more debt. Or I could start over, but that’s the same story. My marriage fell apart. I couldn’t keep the financial stress out of the rest of my life.” He shook his head. “Then Minos happened. They offered debt relief for contracts. I didn’t have anything left, so I went for it.”

  The highway rose, offering a better view. A missile streaked across the rooftops, engulfing an aircraft in a burst of fire. The wreckage plowed through a building without another explosion, as if the neighborhood had swallowed the burning aircraft whole.

  “At least somebody’s fighting back,” said Chen. “Wonder if that’s Precision or the police or if it’s my guys.”

  “When did the insurgency start?”

  “We started with protests. They responded with violence. Didn’t matter how peaceful we were. Whatever we did to push for better conditions, they always found something unacceptable about it. Some way to claim we were threatening. After a while, they didn’t even look for excuses.

  “People started fighting back. I tried to stay out of that at first, but…” He shook his head. “I joined the insurgency six years ago. Too many funerals. Too many of my students. None of them should’ve grown up like this in the first place. It was a mistake to ever sign up for a deal like this even if I wasn’t going to have kids of my own. But here I am, so…” Chen sighed, looking at the battle zone ahead. “Here I am.”

  Silence followed. Tanner didn’t know what to say.

  “Y’know, almost all of my debt was educational debt,” added Chen. “Or something else built onto it. NorthStar schools, mostly. NorthStar lenders.”

  Tanner let out a breath. “Yeah.”

  “Hell of a thing.”

  “Did you have a wife or a husband?” Tanner asked.

  “Huh? Oh, before? Wife.”

  “You ever find anyone else after her?”

  “Oh yeah, man. I’ve got a girlfriend in the city. That marriage was forty years ago. You gotta move on.”

  Tanner grinned. “Good to hear.”

  “What makes you ask?”

  “Long distance relationship. I keep wondering when she’ll get sick of all the drawbacks. Seems like there’s always something.”

  “Shit, if she’ll put up with you and your crazy life, you’d better stick with her.”

  The thunder of combat grew ever louder. The rover rolled down from a final rise in the road. They were close enough now to see the walls. A tank burned at the checkpoint. More firelight glowed on the other side of the gate.

  “You sure about the plan?” Tanner asked.

  “I need to coordinate my people. Precision won’t take care of ordinary folks. They’ll focus on shooting back, not civil defense. We have to watch out for everyone else. Why, you having second thoughts?”

  “Nah. Nah, only thinking about the opportunities.” Tanner fell short of masking the tension in his voice. The gate was coming up fast. “You don’t want a big come-together moment with your arch enemy to fight against an overwhelming common threat?”

  “I don’t see how fighting for her own survival would make up for the shit she’s pulled and the lives she’s destroyed. Or how I’d forget all that.”

  Tanner shook his head. “It’s fine. Figured I should ask. Honestly, those ‘work with your enemy’ moments are never as fulfilling as the movies make out. You still wanna punch ‘em and they still have it coming.”

  * * *

  The last defenders of Checkpoint Echo fought a slow retreat, pushed back less by the loss of personnel than the loss of cover. The enemy’s beam weapons were bad enough, but nothing short of full-coverage carapace body armor protected against fire. Corporal Jay Bouch could stand up to a lot of things. He was a big guy and unafraid of being hurt. Burning to death wouldn’t do him or his buddies any good.

  “Keep moving back,” he called over the din of weapons fire and shouts. “Leapfrog back. We need better cover.” Jay leaned around the corner of a small home and hurled his last grenade at the stone men walking through the middle of the street. They didn’t seem harmed by lasers at all. Grenades at least knocked them down.

  It landed at the stone man’s feet in the middle of the road. The thing seemed to understand the danger, springing forward on those half-backward legs, but Jay had to worry about the grenade first. He ducked around the corner. The baffles in his helmet cut down the worst of the noise as it detonated.

  As soon as the wave of sound and heat passed, Jay whirled around the corner again to shoot. Smoke and haze from his grenade and the fires all around made it tough see. His hearing worked fine, though. Through the smashed-out window right beside him, he heard a crying kid and a mother trying to shush her.

  He didn’t want to let that distract him. Civilians were in danger, and that sucked, but he had to hold the checkpoint as best he could. It didn’t do anyone else any good if he abandoned that. Half the neighborhood was already in flames.

  Everything ground to a halt with that thought: half the neighborhood was already in flames.

  “Mommy, what’s happening?” the kid whimpered.

  “Stay down, honey. Stay down.”

  “Shit,” he hissed. Jay leaned into the window. He saw a shattered bedroom in darkness, with debris strewn across the floor and the bed. “Hey lady, we need to go,” Jay urged. “It’s clear for this second but we gotta go now. Through the window. I’ll help. C’mon.”

  A head popped up from behind the other side of the bed: dark hair, dark features, an entirely, reasonably terrified expression. Jay tugged at her with one empty hand while the other still held his rifle.

  She didn’t hesitate. The woman launched herself up out of hiding with a girl in her arms. She couldn’t be more than five or six. Jay took the kid and pulled away from the window to give the mother space to move. Broken glass and splintered framing didn’t stop her for a second. She was barefoot and wearing little more than a t-shirt and underwear and she didn’t care at all. “Go, go,” she said.

  Jay turned with the girl in one arm, clinging around his neck. In the street, the stone man rose up onto its hands and elbows. Its legs still seemed to work, too. Beyond it, Jay saw more of those armored raiders with their shields through the haze. “Aw fuck. Run!” Jay snapped, tilting his head around the corner.

  He didn’t look back until he was halfway down the block, and only to make sure the mother was keeping up. She was right behind him, but so was the stone man. It stopped near the intersection, framed by the now-abandoned home and the building next door. The red mark in its face brightened rapidly. Jay already knew what that meant.

  Streams of white light flashed behind the stone man, harmless and ordinary but brightening up the intersection. In the background, Jay heard something thump hard around the corner. None of it stopped the stone man as it powered up for a shot Jay couldn’t avoid.

  Then a rover practically flew through the intersection to smash straight into the stone man, ramming it into the building on the other side of the lane. The crash left the stone man pinned between concrete and mangled front bumper.

  Inside the rover, the driver leaned forward with a Diamondback and fired straight through the broken windshield on full auto. Ja
y watched in shock as the front door flew open and the driver rolled out sporting some university t-shirt to hurl a grenade down the street. The guy turned around again to check on the stone man, but it no longer moved.

  He wasn’t alone. Another man climbed out of the rover, looking a little older and of Asian descent where the driver looked more Caucasian or Latino and deeply tanned.

  “You’re good?” asked the driver.

  “Yeah, I’ve got this,” said the other man. He reached out to the shaken mother at Jay’s side. “Listen, I can get you someplace safer if you’ll follow me, okay?”

  The driver looked Jay up and down. He seemed familiar somehow. “Haven’t I seen you on the news?” Jay asked.

  “Maybe.” The guy shrugged. “Listen, a lot of that was hype. Forget it. How do you feel about saving everyone on the planet?”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine:

  Convergence

  “All vessels are to assume general quarters before coming out of FTL. Ground units must be ready to deploy upon reaching orbital range to Minos.”

  --Union Fleet Task Force Communications, August 2280

  “Armory Two at the camp is still intact. They’re issuing weapons now. Our guys here are passing out stock, too,” announced a control room specialist.

  “Looks like they’ve got the armory at the spaceport opened up,” reported another. “They had to tear the doors down but they’re in. Not much but they’ve got some options.”

  “Good,” said Dylan. She leaned on one of the control desks, her eyes fixed primarily on the status map of the city. Areas under friendly control slowly shrank. Reports of fires and collapsed buildings streamed along in text on one side of the wall display.

  “If they’re trying to wipe us out, why haven’t they used heavier weapons? Why haven’t they gone for mass destruction?” she thought out loud. “They coordinated this with earthquakes and a volcanic eruption, for Christ’s sake. If they can do that, why not let the planet do the job?”

  “Yeah, I wondered that, too,” said a voice from the entrance. “Figure they’re doing it this way because they’re pissed.”

  Dylan wondered who’d shown up to speak out of turn. Curiosity vanished as she saw him, leaving her with only annoyance. “I had completely forgotten about you, Malone. Can’t say I needed a reminder now, either. Who let him in here?”

  The corporal at Malone’s side looked up with an apology in his eyes. “Major, he’s got some important shit to tell you.”

  “Who are you? Corporal Bouch? Where are you supposed to be?”

  “I’m what’s left of Checkpoint Echo, ma’am.”

  “Shit,” Dylan grunted. “Go find the armory and get resupplied. Find a squad to hook up with. I need grunts out there. Somebody find a room for Malone and lock him inside.”

  “They’re saving the bigger guns for a bigger fight,” said Malone. The door guard hesitated before grabbing him. “I’m not sure exactly how many more big guns they’ve got, but this isn’t all they have. Their timeline got screwed up and now they need to move. This isn’t their original plan. It’s desperation and rage, which means we’ve got a chance.”

  Dylan’s annoyance only grew. “What do you know?”

  “I know who they are, what they want, where they’re coming from, and where to find their leader. Also a little about how to fight them, but I’m guessing from the guns outside you guys figured out that part.”

  “Yes,” came Dylan’s frigid reply. “Where’s your class? And my squad I sent to watch you?”

  “Your guys are dead. These assholes took them out. My class went for help.”

  Dylan glared, but gestured for him to come over. “Talk fast. I’m gonna punch you every time I feel like you’re being sarcastic or smug.”

  Then it was Malone’s turn to sigh. “Fuck.”

  * * *

  Nail-biting stress threatened to become normal. With that near-normalcy came a certain degree of calm. The shuttle tore across space at top acceleration, its pilot constantly vigilant over the readings from her engineering panel for any sign of malfunction or danger. Yet before long, the loud hum of the engines seemed to become normal for everyone else. Nothing new appeared on scanners to threaten or intercept them.

  “No way are they changing their minds about us now,” grunted Emily. “Not when they’re so deep into the planet’s gravity well and spreading out. Either they somehow didn’t see us or they don’t care.”

  “We shouldn’t assume anything about their tech until we’ve seen it,” said Naomi. “For all we know those things can jump to FTL from the surface.” She sat behind Emily and Gina, watching the scanners as intently as the other women. The Minoan vessels slowly spread out around the planet. In the past few minutes, every channel from Minos had gone from broken and static-filled transmissions to silence.

  “Nothing jumps to FTL that close to a planet,” said Emily.

  “It’s alien tech. We don’t know what it can do. We can’t even be sure it works on the same principles as ours.”

  “Fair enough,” the pilot conceded.

  “Feels like it’s safe to guess those are warships and they’re armed. Think they’ll bombard the cities? Or the smaller outposts?” asked Gina.

  “It doesn’t look like they’re doing that so far,” said Emily.

  “They were pretty clear about wanting to wipe everything off the map,” said Gina.

  “Maybe they didn’t mean exactly that,” said Naomi. “Remember, they were angry about their memories being stolen. They wanted to recover whatever they could. And maybe they stand to gain by looting or salvaging. Maybe some of our stuff is better than theirs. Who knows?”

  “I know the longer those ships sit there doing nothing, the better I feel,” said Emily. “On that note, this is all still crazy, but the indicator light says the bathroom is open and I should check on my family. Ready to watch this?” she asked Gina.

  “We’re good,” Gina replied. “I suppose if any more ships jump out at us while you’re out there’s not much we can do about it anyway, right?”

  “We can try, but I hear you.”

  “Go ahead.” Gina flashed a weary smile at Emily as the pilot stepped out. Her eyes flicked up to Naomi when the other woman sank into Emily’s seat. “Hey.”

  “Hey,” said Naomi.

  “How are you holding up?”

  “I’m not sure how to answer that. Maybe if I don’t think about it I won’t scream or cry or curl up in a ball in the corner,” Naomi muttered.

  “Then you’re holding up fine.”

  “So you’re a spy?”

  Gina sighed. “I knew that was coming. Yes, I am. More or less.”

  “What does ‘more or less’ mean?”

  “It means most people have a different definition for that word than I do. Or people like me.” She shook her head. “Professional trivia. You’re not gonna care. And I don’t want to get into repeating or clarifying. I can’t—in fact, there are a whole lot of things I can’t get into. Sorry.”

  “Should I keep calling you Gina? Or something else?”

  “I’m really a Gina. Most of what you know about me is true. I didn’t go straight into this job out of high school. Not that my agency ever takes in anyone that young. So I have a little more of a personal history out there than most. My bosses figured it was better to go with that than to try to cover it up. Granted, most of my life is the sort of stuff you’d want to keep private, anyway, but that only enhanced my credibility.”

  “Were you here to watch Tanner, or were you watching the expedition?”

  “Initially, it was all Tanner. Right up until I knew we were looking at a whole new alien race. That seemed a little more important, but I couldn’t get a report out.”

  “Why?” asked Naomi.

  “Why what? Why Tanner? You know his story, right?”

  “Doesn’t everybody?”

  “No. Not really. You could probably count the number of people who know it all on your fingers. Tha
t’s one reason my bosses wanted somebody keeping an eye on him.”

  “Then why let him go free at all?” asked Naomi.

  “Because things were complicated enough when the Debtor’s War ended. Letting him go made for fewer complications. Everybody who cared had bigger fish to fry.” Gina shrugged. “And because a few of the right people figured they owed it to him.”

  Naomi considered Gina’s words. “You mean everybody already got what they wanted out of him,” she said.

  “Oh, there’s plenty of self-interest mixed up in all this. But the craziest thing I’ve learned as a spy is sometimes even the most powerful people want to do the right thing.” Gina smiled. “And yes, I know how that sounds. Nobody’s more surprised than me.

  “I’ll say this much: Tanner isn’t dumb, but I don’t think he knew how well he played his hand. Not until it all shook out in the end. Maybe not even then. But here we are.”

  Naomi looked to the display screens. Nothing had changed. Minos sat in silence, with much of its land masses covered in dark clouds and alien starships looming in orbit. “Do you think he can pull this off?”

  “Can? Yes. Will? Maybe. I don’t know. We can’t do anything about it now. All this is bigger than any of us. Bigger than him, too.”

  The shuttle flew on. Neither of them spoke. Though the engines ran at maximum and the numbers on the screens climbed, the sheer scale of outer space made even this headlong charge feel like a crawl.

  “Gina.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You were undercover as a student.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Lots of spy tools at your disposal? Software? Support?”

  “I can’t really talk about that. Why?”