“Calm down. If they were going to kill her, they’d have done it already. The fact that she’s there means either they don’t know who she is, or they are using her as a symbol of the corporations’ defeat.” Walter pointed at the monitor. “If I go out there without good intel, I’ll get her killed in the blink of an eye. I need you to look it all over—as many cameras as you can—and isolate each of their soldiers.”
“But I don’t have facial recognition software and even if I did, the balaclavas they’re wearing would—”
“I don’t care who they are, just what.”
Ivan turned and set to work. “How does this help?”
“Tells me who I have to kill.”
Ivan diligently cycled through the various cameras on the estate. The house itself appeared to be empty and locked up, but a couple of guards had been stationed on the patio overlooking the gardens. One of them had the bearing of a trained soldier. The other looked like his combat experience came from a long-running war against the rabbits that kept despoiling his vegetable garden. The continued survey spotted eighteen more guards, four of whom were professionals, and the rest were amateurs. Half of them had batons only, the rest had handguns in holsters on their hips.
Ivan looked back at him. “Twenty . . .”
“Five are real trouble.” The mercenary frowned. “Spurs, I know you love your sister. I’m going to get her out of there no matter what.”
Ivan closed his eyes. “But people are going to die.”
“The Collective picked this fight, not us.”
“But it’s not just agents of the Collective who will die.”
Walter cocked his head. “You’re thinking about people who might be collateral damage, right? That their deaths will be on your hands?”
Ivan nodded mutely.
“No easy way to say this, Spurs, but we can’t be sure that the Collective won’t shoot them anyway when they’ve filled all the graves. That notwithstanding, they are your people. Some of them will die.” Walter opened his hands. “I’m ready to take that responsibility. Comes with my job. Can you?”
The Chairman Presumptive looked down at his hands. “I don’t know.”
“Your honesty does you credit.” Walter nodded. “Keep an eye on me at all times. Teams appear to rotate, with people digging, then fetching bodies. When your sister rotates to getting a body, that’s when I’ll make my move. When you see me count down with my left hand, each finger curling down into fist, at the end, when it’s a fist like this, you kill all the lights. Got it?”
“Yes.”
The mercenary pointed a finger at him. “And, no matter what happens, you stay here. You don’t stir. You getting captured or killed isn’t going to help one way or another.”
Ivan nodded. “Are you sure you can do this? You’re a MechWarrior not—”
“I’ve done this sort of work before, Spurs. If I survive this time, maybe I’ll tell you about the last. Just remember the signal and we’ll be okay.”
“Walter, good luck.” Ivan offered him his hand. “And thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Walter dropped down and crawled through the exit. “Button this up after me.”
In the blockhouse, the console retracted behind Walter and clicked shut. He let the sound die. The quiet transformed the building into a mausoleum. A shiver ran down his spine, but he fought off the unease. Instead he embraced a moment of peace, then set out into the night.
As he moved through the darkness, Walter found himself curiously detached from what he was about to do. This sort of thing had never been part of his joining the Angels or coming to Maldives. That didn’t deter him. He assumed he would die, so his only real consideration was to make certain that Sophia did not. He also couldn’t summon any hatred or sympathy for the Collective agents he’d have to kill—they were simply obstacles between him and getting Sophia to safety. The other prisoners . . . He didn’t allow himself to feel anything about them at all—concern for them could doom Sophia.
In occurred to him that his attitude about the other prisoners was very much like the attitudes of the Corporate Personnel departments which likely inspired the revolt. He would seem to be perpetuating the willful disregard for the lives of others which made the Collective act. The irony of the fact that their actions showed a similar willful disregard for life was not lost upon him.
Nor was the fact that existential crises and philosophical musings meant nothing on a battlefield. Stuff and nonsense for memoirs and historians.
Walter reached the corner of the mansion nearest his first target. She stood silhouetted against the lights shining down on the garden. Walter surrendered about five centimeters to her, but figured they’d weigh about the same stripped out of their gear. She wore body armor and carried a long gun, but held it loosely by the grip, with the barrel resting on her shoulder. Why not? She’s got nothing to fear.
Five meters of ferrocrete separated them. Walter drew the knife from his belt. The double-edged dagger had been made of blackened steel, with a blade a good eighteen centimeters long, three wide. Walter held it low in his right hand and crouched. He advanced slowly, knowing that quick movement would alert others. While the next closest guard was a civilian and likely not going to fight back, his raising an alarm would end things fast.
Two steps away and Walter pounced. He grabbed her throat from behind in his left hand. He squeezed, hard. She clawed at his hand. At the same time he drove the dagger up into her armpit, stabbing deep and twisting the blade. A spurt of blood chased its withdrawal from the wound. He plunged the knife in again, a bit lower, between the ribs through the body armor’s flank gap, and then a third time, dragging her back with him into the shadows.
The first wound had done the job. The blade severed her brachial artery. The bloody spray accompanied an immediate crash of her blood pressure. She’s gone limp before he returned to the house’s shadows and within a minute and a half she’d bled out.
Walter waited in the shadows over her dead body. Further to his right stood the corpse truck. Pairs of prisoners, each led by a guard, stumbled to it, dragged a body from the bed, and hauled it by wrists and ankles to the open grave. They didn’t move very quickly, but clearly took pains to make sure they didn’t bang the bodies around like so much meat and bones.
There she is.
Sophia, her blonde hair hanging limply and her shoulders rounded wearily, shuffled her way along the path toward the truck. Walter didn’t detect a limp, or any other sign of further injury. That made him smile—both because he didn’t want to see her hurt, and adrenaline could counter weariness. Odds are getting better.
Walter raised his left hand and slowly folded fingers in. For every two meters she got closer to the truck, he folded another finger in. Almost there.
Then the second patio guard appeared only five meters away. “Cara?”
Walter stood. “Hurry, here, she’s been hurt.”
Without thinking, the man ran toward Walter. The mercenary drew his needle pistol and as he closed his left fist to signal Ivan, he shot the second guard in the face.
When Walter had first charged the pistol, a blade had sliced a thin layer of ballistic polymer into a dozen flechettes. The propellant gasses filled the firing chamber and with the trigger pull, blasted out a cloud of needles. Before the recoil and cocking mechanism had loaded another sheaf of flechettes into the chamber, the first cloud struck the man. Most slid along his skull, peeling the flesh away, but several pierced his eyes. They ran the length of his optic nerves and impaled his brain.
The pistol’s report didn’t carry very far. No one had a chance to even glance in that direction before the lights snapped off. Angry voices shouted commands. Fearful screams pierced the darkness.
Then someone started shooting.
Walter rushed forward. “Phee. Phee!”
“Here!”
He grabbed her hand in the darkness and pulled her with him toward the front of the truck. Gunfire crackled. Muzzle flashes strobed like lightning. People screamed—in pain, in fear, in vain hopes of stopping the firefight. Bullets pinged from the truck. Lasers burned scars on the building, and flechettes hissed like wind-driven sand off the truck’s siding.
“Phee, run to the house. Go. I’m right behind you.” He gave her a shove toward the building, then came around the edge of the truck, providing her a moment’s more shielding with his own body. “Run!”
The firefight had descended full-blown into the chaos that was war. The civilians scurried everywhere, silhouetted against muzzle flashes. The Collective’s mercenaries rarely shot, but the citizen-soldiers filling out their squads cut loose with abandon. They shot at everything and nothing, most often targeting their comrades by muzzle flash. The prisoners, caught in the crossfire, dove for the ground.
Walter raced after Sophia. He worried most about being tagged by an errant shot, but since no one was firing from the house, not much in the way of return fire headed in that direction. He reached the edge of the patio and crouched. No Sophia. Then a light flashed on inside the house, for a second or two. A figure ran toward the sliding glass panel and the lock clicked.
Someone went in low, and Walter followed as fast as he could. “Phee.”
“Here.” The voice came small and tremulous, from a hallway just the other side of the room.
Walter slid the glass door shut, then crawled over to the doorway. He pulled off the balaclava. “Phee, it’s me, Walter.”
Arms encircled him in the dark and hugged him tightly. She just shook and he returned the hug with one arm, keeping his gun free. “Shhhh, it will be okay.”
“How can it be you? You . . . you . . .”
“Haven’t shaved, I know.”
“Walter, you’re dead. They broadcast it hourly. All the time.”
He gave her another squeeze. “Their fantasy isn’t our reality.”
“Ivan?”
“Also alive. He’s the one working the lights.”
“And the sound.” Speakers in the ceiling crackled with Ivan’s voice. “You have to get out of there now! Go back to the truck, take it. No time to explain. I’ll fix things for you. Go! Don’t stop for anything. Go!”
Walter stood and took Sophia’s hand. “Ready?”
She smeared dirt across her cheek as she swiped a tear. “Don’t let go.”
“Never.”
Walter slid the door open slowly, hoping to avoid any sound. It made little, and the hiss of water from the estate’s sprinkling system smothered it easily. They stayed low until the edge of the patio. He tightened his grip on her hand, nodded toward the truck. “Driver’s side, keep the truck between us and bullets.”
Sophia nodded.
They were off.
Gunfire continued, but sporadically now. Someone was shouting for lights. Others cried out for aid. They got around the front of the truck and into the cab before anyone noticed them. And even then, when Walter started the truck, no one shot at them immediately.
“Stay down.”
Walter hit the accelerator and the truck lurched forward across the lawn. Water from the sprinklers sprayed up against the windscreen. The truck hit a bump as it gained speed. Bodies shifted and slid off the back. A rifle barked and the rear window spiderwebbed.
Then all the lights behind them came on at once with full intensity. The reflected brilliance stung Walter’s eyes, but gave him enough of a view to turn right, heading toward the front of the house. Then sparks shot behind him and everything went abruptly dark.
Way to go, Spurs. Walter smiled. Ivan had turned the water on to soak everything and everyone. Then he pumped a lot of current into the lights. Their cables and connections shorted, sending a jolt through those on the wet field. And because we were in the truck, we got away clean.
Sophia sat up. “Is it safe?”
“Should be. We’ll swing around, get Ivan, and get out of here.” Walter hit the truck’s lights, and then cranked the wheel hard to the left. The truck careened around the mansion’s front drive and raced toward the estate’s gate.
“Walter!”
He hit the brake hard, the truck fishtailing through gravel. “Oh, shit.”
“That’s why he wanted us to go fast.” Sophia gasped, her shoulders slumped and she rested her forehead on the dashboard. “So close.”
A hundred meters to the west, marching through the estate’s gates without even having to bow its head, came the first of the Rivergaard Rangers’ ’Mechs. A Wasp, the lead humanoid war machine dropped the medium laser in line with the truck’s nose.
To start up again was to die.
“I’m sorry, Sophia.” Walter sat back and raised his hands. “I guess I still owe you a rescue.”
About the Author
Michael A. Stackpole is an award-winning writer, game designer, computer game designer, podcaster, screenwriter and graphic novelist who is best known for his New York Times bestselling novels I, Jedi and Rogue Squadron. He is currently the Distinguished Visiting Writer in Residence at the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. When not writing or teaching, he spends too much time playing games and figuring out how to cook things that taste good.
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