by Adam Quinn
Taylor touched Hezekiah’s shoulder and pointed at the squadron. “Are those Meltian Guard?”
“They don’t have the emblem.” Hezekiah squinted. “I don’t think they’d let anyone else down here, though—civilian air traffic is supposed to be grounded.”
Taylor knew she was probably just being paranoid, but she did not like those gunboats. They reminded her far too much of the lone but similarly unmarked craft that had kicked off the Royal City attack.
She pulled out her transceiver and queried Brook.
“Hey Taylor, how’s the parade going?”
“Fine. Who’s in charge of Telahmir’s air defenses?”
“Uh, that’d be the Telahmir Security Command—TeSeComm.”
“Route me through to them. Tell them Admiral Taylor Ghatzi wants to speak with them.”
“Taylor, are you okay?” Hezekiah asked.
“I’m fine.” Hezekiah knew she didn’t like using her title, but it got things done.
“TeSeComm Air Defense and Identification.”
“TeSeComm, I’m watching six gunboats enter the city’s airspace in a tight formation,” Taylor said. “Do you see them?”
“Yes, Ma’am. They have the right codes.”
“What, specifically, are they registered as?”
“Civilian cargo; destination: commercial zone eleven.”
Taylor’s blood ran cold. “Do those look like civilian cargo to you, TeSeComm?”
“Uh, not rea—”
“Give me all important public buildings in or around commercial zone eleven,” Taylor said.
“Uh, there’s a warehouse for the Meltian Guard Culinary Logistics Department… oh, and the headquarters of the TKG.”
The transceiver clattered against the brick road. A flurry of rockets flew from the gunboats, tiny brilliant streaks across the sky. The surrounding buildings hid the explosions—but not the billowing smoke or the percussive sound.
People screamed.
The Human Race contingent cheered.
Taylor almost thrust her arms in front of her to activate her SX-7’s flight mode, but her SX-7 was on the Kindred Spirit. She had no tools, much less weapons. She was off-duty. It was the responsibility of the Meltian Guard, the local MRES, maybe even the IES to intervene, but certainly not hers.
Taylor took a running leap into the street.
“Taylor!” Hezekiah could not match her speed.
She seized the man leading the TKG demonstration by the collar. “Your twenty best soldiers to TKG Headquarters now.”
“Who in the galaxy—”
She ripped off her Newface. “Admiral Taylor Ghatzi. That’s an order.”
Taylor scanned the parade scene. A Meltian man threw a punch at a member of the Human Race. Two Guardsmen shifted to grab him, leaving an opening in their perimeter. A brawl broke out. Taylor’s eyes settled on an open-top hovercar in the middle of the parade.
She sprinted toward it, telekinetically removed its occupants, and leaped into the driver’s seat before they could protest. Hezekiah swung himself into the seat next to Taylor.
“What are you doing?” Taylor asked.
“Coming with.”
“You’re unarmed.” Technically, Taylor was too, but she had her telekinesis.
“Then let me drive.”
They swapped seats, and Hezekiah pulled back on the control stick while pushing the throttle forward, sending the hovercar soaring into the sky.
From this vantage point, Taylor saw that four of the Alliance gunboats were on the ground, while two circled above the heavily damaged TKG Headquarters. A squadron of Meltian interceptors dove toward the gunboats, spraying them with sear gun fire. The gunboats replied with rockets. Three interceptors were engulfed in balls of fire while one of the gunboats listed to the side before falling onto TKG Headquarters. A section of the roof collapsed under its weight, sending up plumes of dust and debris.
“Bring us in low!” The Meltian Guard could sort out the gunboats, but terrorists like the one from the Anniversary Attacks were probably already making their way into TKG Headquarters. Taylor had not seen Joseph or Fanu at the parade, which meant they were probably still in the building. Unless they had been killed instantly by the rocket volley.
Hezekiah gave her a doubtful look but dove back down before leveling off just a few meters above the street. They were almost there.
Taylor grabbed Hezekiah’s transceiver and queried the Kindred Spirit. “Brook!”
“I see it, Ghatzi, we’re en route.”
“I’m going in.”
“What?”
Taylor dropped the transceiver next to Hezekiah. Their hovercar soared through TKG Headquarters’s plaza. There had to be a dozen terrorists on the ground. A heat stream whizzed by Taylor’s head.
“What’s your plan?” Hezekiah swung the hovercar around the back of the TKG’s headquarters.
“Take me over the top of the building!”
Hezekiah pulled up on the control stick, and the hovercar gained altitude, flying low over the roof. One of the four grounded gunboats was taking off. It launched a rocket at them. Taylor telekinetically turned it around to slam into the gunboat that fired it.
“Now what?” Hezekiah asked.
“Now you get out of here!” Taylor dove out of the hovercar.
Air whistled past her. The roof was pockmarked with holes, so Taylor chose one and plummeted into the building. She exerted an upward telekinetic force on herself, counteracting gravity in order to slow her descent and finally land in a crouch on the ground floor inside of TKG Headquarters.
The air throbbed with chaos. There were a few actual TKG soldiers, but all of them were busy stumbling across the sandstone rubble and broken glass and twisted computers in a vain attempt to control the crowd of what seemed to be hundreds and hundreds of Freeborners.
Taylor was almost paralyzed by the scene. She longed for her SX-7 to dull the sound of sear guns overhead and screaming at her feet, and to erase the mingling scents of rocket fumes and burnt flesh.
“Taylor!”
Her name drew her attention to the floor, where Fanu was balanced on two knees and one arm, as her opposite arm was blackened to the extent that it was unrecognizable as such.
“Fanu!” Taylor telekinetically lifted the TKG soldier, laying Fanu’s good arm across her shoulders for support.
“We have to get to the front,” Fanu gasped.
“Your arm—”
“It’s cauterized.” Fanu sounded more angry than anything else. “I’m not dying today, but there are a bunch of Freeborners who might if we don’t give these terrorist scumbags a hand into their graves.”
“Right.” Taylor supported Fanu as they moved toward the front of TKG Headquarters.
“Get back!” Fanu yelled at the Freeborners they passed. “Get to the back!”
Patches of the building’s power were offline, but daylight streaming in through jagged holes torn in the floors above kept the scenes of destruction tolerably well-lit by a dapple of natural and artificial light. Many of the kids had hairline cuts across their faces and hands from flying glass, while others had wounds like Fanu’s. Taylor gritted her teeth and pushed forward. The Alliance had already proven its utter disregard for civilian life, but attacking a group of nine- and ten-year-olds pulled them another notch down the descending hierarchy of evil.
As if summoned by her thoughts, an Alliance terrorist rounded a corner ahead of them. Fanu slammed a fist-sized chunk of sandstone into his stomach, and he doubled over. Taylor pulled Fanu out of the way of the heat stream he fired back.
She leaned Fanu against a half-destroyed wall. “Cover me.”
Taylor lunged out from behind the wall. The terrorist was about to drive a heat stream into her when Fanu hurled a barrage of telekinetic force in his direction, forcing him to dive behind an overturned computer workstation. Taylor telekinetically slammed that workstation into him, then followed up with a close-range telekinetic pulse to
the head.
The terrorist slumped against the ground, and Taylor retrieved Fanu. Together they turned the corner around which the terrorist had come and found themselves in the TKG’s entry hall. The fancy lens-door was in a thousand blackened shards, and the TKG soldier who had checked Brook’s ID was dead on the ground. In front of them, nine terrorists fanned out from the door in three groups of three.
“Help!”
Taylor’s attention—and the terrorists’—was drawn to two Freeborners, a human boy and girl, who had become trapped under a piece of fallen sandstone. Fanu telekinetically lifted the rock, and the terrorists were about to scorch the pair, but Taylor gave the Freeborners a telekinetic push out of the line of fire. They scrambled behind her and Fanu.
Which drew the attention of the terrorists their way.
Taylor pulled the piece of sandstone between her and the terrorists, shielding her from their first volley of fire, then dove behind the meter-high remnant of what used to be a wall, one arm wrapped around Fanu’s waist. The children followed her, barely avoiding two more streams of heat. Taylor stuck her head above their cover to slam the nearest terrorist with telekinetic energy, but she was forced to dive back down again when the other terrorists returned fire. If she were alone and had her SX-7, she could harry these terrorists indefinitely, but with her three charges, she was significantly hindered.
With a roar, their cover burst into flame. Taylor scrambled backward from it, helping Fanu out of harm’s way, but placing them all in the terrorists’ line of fire.
Crash!
A wall on the other side of the entry hall split open, and a white-bearded TKG soldier burst into the room, a sheen of sweat on his face and a vortex of sandstone, glass, and metal debris whirling around him: Joseph Moore.
The nearest group of three sent their streams at him, but the vortex absorbed the heat energy before whipping out to knock the terrorists from their feet.
Taylor hustled Fanu and the Freeborners to new cover. She could run, but Fanu and the children might be hit as they tried to make an escape. At first, it looked like Joseph was going to beat the terrorists outright, but then they spread out, pumping heat streams at him from all angles, and his exhaustion began to show in the slowing of his protective vortex. Joseph was probably the most powerful telekinetic in the TKG, but he was also at least into his seventies.
Despair gripped Taylor as she heard the sounds of continued rocket and sear gun fire outside. The Meltian Guard was still engaging the gunboats. Joseph was no longer striking back at the terrorists—instead, he steadily retreated deeper into the building. Taylor struck one of the terrorists with a telekinetic pulse from behind, but that just drew their attention back to her group.
For a second, the light streaming into the entry hall from where the front door used to be was obstructed.
Then a hovercar smashed through the frame of that door as well as most of the surrounding wall, mauling three of the terrorists before coming to a stop. Even before it did, the half-dozen parade-armored TKG soldiers crammed into its seats spilled out, inundating the terrorists with a hail of telekinetic energy. Four were cut down where they stood, while the remaining two fled deeper into the building, pursued by three TKG soldiers apiece. Only the hovercar’s driver remained.
“Hezekiah.” Taylor breathed heavily as she stood up. “I told you to get out of here.”
“I did.” He grinned. “I left, I found a few formerly-parading TKG soldiers who needed a lift back to their headquarters, and I couldn’t resist helping them out.”
Taylor opened her mouth to call his actions reckless, but Hezekiah had said the same thing to her many times before. At any rate, Fanu’s arm was still blackened, and the Freeborner girl was cradling some wound on her leg. “Hezekiah, we need to get these people to a hospital.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that.” Hezekiah pointed up. Though they were still on the ground floor of the building, enough holes had been punched in its upper levels to allow them to see the sky above. “It looks like we have friends in high places. Literally.”
A shadow drifted across Taylor’s face, and she realized the sounds of aerial battle had ceased. She looked up to find a now-familiar shape filling the sky above.
The MRS Kindred Spirit.
A rain of hundreds of MRES drones and dozens of control boats descended from the ship… only to come to a halt a hundred meters above the ground.
“Well.” Hezekiah was evidently as surprised as she was to see the drones and control boats stop as if blocked by an invisible barrier. “I suppose I can give you a ride, then.”
Four MRSIS agents, one of them carrying a dozen thick black bags, entered the building through the hole Hezekiah’s hovercar made in the wall.
Their very presence aggravated Taylor. “What’s going on?”
“Collecting evidence, Ma’am.” The bag carrier kneeled in front of a fallen terrorist and helped his comrades insert the corpse into one of the black bags.
Collecting evidence? Taylor could see Harrison prioritizing that over helping the wounded Freeborners, but Harrison was not in control of the IES fleet, and there was no way Captain Brook would succumb to pressure to let Harrison’s agents have first access to the scene.
As if to answer her question, a Meltian gunboat with MRSIS markings drifted through the air between Taylor and the IES fleet.
“Of course you are.” Taylor fixed the MRSIS agents with an icy glare. There was only one barrier that could restrain a fleet of IES drones so close to their targets: the threat that an MRSIS gunboat would shoot them down, sending them crashing into those they intended to help.
Then she spotted the man who had erected that barrier, chatting with a gaggle of reporters in front of the TKG’s now-broken fountain.
Taylor gritted her teeth. “Hezekiah, load up these three, and as many injured as you can, and take them to the nearest hospital. I’ve got to go have a little chat with the Director of the MRSIS.”
“Right,” Hezekiah said. “Taylor, I’m sorry.”
Taylor paused. “What?”
“This is the worst relaxing excursion in the galaxy.”
Taylor’s face twisted into a bitter smile. “Relaxing? No. But if we can help these Freeborners, it’ll be worth it.” With that, she strode rapidly out of the building and across the plaza, past the wrecks of the terrorists’ gunboats and the TKG’s fountain.
Harrison was speaking, flanked by two dark-suited MRSIS agents. “… thankfully, the MRSIS has the situation under control, though—”
“Tell me, Harrison, what do you have under control?” Taylor asked.
The cameras and microphones of the gaggle of reporters around Harrison swung toward Taylor.
“Taylor Ghatzi!” one of them cried out.
Harrison edged up next to Taylor to keep himself in the cameras’ views.
“Ah, Ms. Ghatzi,” he said. “Fancy seeing you here.”
“No,” Taylor said. “Fancy seeing you here, talking about how you have things under control when I did not see a single Special Intelligence Service agent in there while we were fighting for the lives of hundreds of TKG Freeborners, and now I see them preventing those Freeborners from receiving medical attention.”
Harrison laughed congenially and threw an arm around Taylor’s shoulders. She gave him a telekinetic shove that sent him reeling into his agents.
“My apologies.” Harrison turned to the reporters. “Ms. Ghatzi thought that I was trying to take credit for the defeat of the Jacobin-Alliance terrorists at the hands of the Telekinetic Guard. While we wish that we could have mobilized quickly enough to assist them, the fact remains that the MRSIS’s primary duty is investigation and intelligence, which is why we are ensuring that all relevant artifacts of the attack are accounted for and delivered to the proper experts, so we can ensure that an attack like this never happens again.”
Harrison pointed off to his left, where an agent was loading the bodies of terrorists into an MRSIS hovertruck. Ta
ylor was surprised to see that it was Marissa—the other night she had said she was not assigned to the Alliance case, but perhaps this operation had required extra manpower.
Taylor thrust an accusing finger at Harrison’s chest. “You’re not investigating, you’re absconding with the evidence so we can’t find out who’s behind this attack!”
“We already know that this is the work of the so-called Free Alliance for Humanity, backed by the Jacobin organization,” Harrison said. “Our main concerns are how they penetrated our defenses and how we can most effectively prosecute the Jacobins—questions which my experts at the MRSIS will begin working on immediately.”
As he spoke, an MRSIS tow ship arrived, seized one of the terrorist gunboats, and lifted it away.
“Do you want to know what my main concerns are, Harrison? Because I’ll tell you.” Taylor telekinetically lifted the noses of the reporters’ cameras so that they pointed at the idle IES fleet. “Number one, that your agents are obstructing the Emergency Service in the aftermath of a terror attack. Number two, that they’re doing so in order to remove evidence from the scene of that attack, because it might disprove your baseless assertion that the Jacobins are behind the Alliance and thus stop your politically-motivated prosecution!”
To Taylor’s surprise, Harrison did not try to interrupt her or stop her outburst.
“Cut,” he said after she had finished. “Have the studio drop those last thirty seconds and go to an ad break.”
“Yes, sir,” one of the reporters said. They all lowered their cameras.
Taylor turned away in disgust and strode back toward TKG Headquarters. Of course the media would be on Harrison’s payroll—paranoid as he was, he wouldn’t tolerate their presence if they weren’t. Yet she couldn’t understand how those reporters justified it to themselves in the face of such a tragedy. Did they believe in Harrison so much that they didn’t care if his actions led to the deaths of dozens of Freeborners? Did they need his bribe money so much that they ignored their consciences? Were they so afraid of standing up to him that they would acquiesce to such a crime just to maintain the status quo?