by Joel Babbitt
“Josh, you crazy…” Rianna didn’t get to finish her words. Right then Langdon pulled a hidden blaster pistol from under the control console and shot at her. Fortunately his wounds left him unbalanced and his shot struck the wall behind her.
Rianna immediately aimed and fired. The shot struck Langdon in the middle of his armored chest, knocking him back against the console. The blaster pistol he held went skittering across the floor.
“Agh! You shot me again!” Langdon cried hollowly, slowly slumping to the floor, the wind partially knocked out of him.
“Josh, turn it off!” Rianna cried.
“Ugh, I can’t,” Langdon muttered.
“What do you mean you can’t?!”
“It takes Brutian’s codes to disarm the bomb.”
“Where’s the bomb?” Rianna asked, her voice a pitch or two higher than normal.
“In the sub-basement,” Langdon said, pointing downward. “Entrance is in the center of the big room.”
Rianna looked out at the big room with all its crates stacked about.
“Four minutes and thirty second remaining…”
Running out into the middle of the big room, she could see a stack of crates on top of a high-security hatch. Standing back, she thought for a moment. If she’d had her own slicing tools, she probably could have hacked through the hatch’s obviously strong security routines, though it probably would have taken all the remaining time. But if they had this sort of security on the hatch, she was pretty certain the security on the bomb itself was probably even tighter.
Crying out in frustration, she turned back toward the control room—just in time to see her brother coming through the door from the passage that led to the garage.
“Jim! You’ve got to get out of here!” Rianna shouted over the blaring claxons.
Ryker looked around the place. Seeing there was no immediate danger, he walked quickly up to his sister. “Did you wipe my memory?” he yelled. The blaring claxons were loudest in this large, circular room.
“Jim, we don’t have time for this!” Rianna answered. “Josh Langdon’s in that control room and he set the bomb under this hatch to blow us all up!”
“Then let’s get out of here!” Ryker yelled, almost hopping up and down.
Thinking for a second, Rianna mentally gave up on trying to stop the bomb and nodded her head. “Okay, go get a quadcopter ready for us, one of those jet quadcopters.”
“Four minutes”
“You’re coming too, right?” Ryker asked, looking like he wanted to bolt.
“Yes! Jim, Shannon’s in the men’s restroom. She’s wounded. Get her on the quadcopter.”
“Don’t take long!” Ryker said as he bolted toward the garage.
Running back toward the control room, Rianna entered the room with her pistol in front of her. Langdon was on the floor in front of her, trying to stand up. In his hand was one of his blaster pistols. Leveling her pistol, she shot his right hand, slicing the pistol in two as well.
“Ahhh!”
“Josh, get back!” Rianna shouted. Langdon was already pulling back and leaning against the console, holding his ruined hand under his arm pit and screaming. She holstered her pistol.
Running forward, Rianna found the deep-space dimmer and plugged the red chip in. Punching in coordinates to her handler’s secret base in a nearby system, she hit transmit then quickly went to the local comms unit and plugged in the blue chip. Within moments she had transmitted using Josh Langdon’s identity stamp to everyone within twenty kilometers all the evidence of Stellar Corp’s illegal involvement in selling contraband technology to the now-crippled Principay Colony.
Smiling to herself, Rianna Firstwave checked the dimmer to ensure the sources of that contraband tech had transmitted successfully, then pulled out both chips. “Mission accomplished,” she said to herself.
“Three minutes, thirty seconds,” the mechanical voice boomed over the sound of the claxons.
“Rianna, you can’t just leave me here!” Langdon cried out as Rianna turned to leave.
Looking down at the man she had once loved, before money had twisted him, she quickly made her decision. Bending down, she dragged him up to his feet by his one good hand and grabbed him by the waist.
“Can you walk with me?” she asked.
Suddenly Langdon grabbed the pistol from Rianna’s holster and fell back into the chair. “I’m done, Ree, and now so are you!”
“But I trusted you…”
Suddenly, from the doorway to the control room a blaster bolt seared through Josh Langdon’s other hand, knocking Rianna’s blaster pistol flying as Ryker stepped into the room. Langdon slumped back into the chair, the pain of his fresh wound mixing with all the other pain that wracked his body. Smiling through bloody, cracked teeth, he cackled with an insane glee.
“You won’t get out of here!” Langdon screamed. “We’re all going to blow up together!”
Ryker grabbed Rianna’s arm, pulling her from the room. As they departed, Jim Ryker threw a small metal ball into the control room. “Here you go, Josh,” he said, then turned to run. Five seconds later a ball of super-heated plasma and fire engulfed the small control room, ending Josh Langdon’s insane laughter, though Ryker and Rianna were already through the door and running down the passage toward the garage.
“Warning, three minutes to reach minimum safe distance before nuclear detonation.”
Fifteen seconds later Jim Ryker had a still unconscious Shannon Washington strapped onto his quadcopter behind him and he and his sister Rianna Firstwave were both blasting out of the bunker into the open air of the hillside on jet quadcopters.
Almost three minutes later, as the trio took cover some fifteen kilometers away down in a steep ravine, two of the three solkin commanders, almost all of the paradroid suppressors, and the entire contingent of solkin assassins were vaporized when a low-grade nuclear detonation lit up the sky just eight kilometers north of Principay Colony.
Sergeant Thompson, the survivalist Jack Wolf, and Specialist Ya-da-na had seen the blast light up the mid-morning sky from two ridges away, and now their armored survey truck was sprinting away from the small mushroom cloud as fast as it could bump along on the uneven ground of the eastern steppes. Its top hatch was closed and all of its windows were up. Even with all that, being only three kilometers away from the blast when it happened meant that the three of them would need nano-treatment for radiation when all this was done.
Chapter Twenty Seven
Colonel Alexander’s jet quadcopter had one modification made to it that he had not known about when he first saw it; a lower-power heavy laser that rotated out of a hidden compartment in the lower hull. His eyebrows went up when he first discovered it, riding along at almost two hundred kilometers per hour as he was.
“Well, at least there’s one thing about Titus Brutian I can appreciate,” he said to himself. “He’s paranoid enough to mount weapons on everything.”
He’d followed Brutian’s grav-sled out of the hidden garage in his secret bunker, but the thirty second lead Brutian had, plus the need to fly nap-of-the-earth to evade detection by the solkin forces gathering at the bunker’s entrance area, had kept him from catching Brutian so far. It didn’t help that Brutian had zig-zagged in a clear attempt to evade. However, as he flew along out in the open terrain of the Eastern Steppes, Alexander knew one thing: the ‘Backdoor’ that Langdon had mentioned had to be linked somehow to the caribou drones they’d intercepted coming from the east.
For fifteen minutes he’d flown almost directly east, hoping to get a blip on his linker, and his patience had been rewarded. Off to the south of him as he flew east he got the faintest electronic blip. Turning in a gentle arc to the right, he saw the blip again, then again a few seconds later. It was obvious that Brutian, assuming it was him, was following the large, lazy blue line that meandered its way across the map of this portion of the eastern steppes, likely popping up beyond the level of the banks from time to time, w
hich would be when the linker captured Brutian’s tracks.
Alexander smiled. The ruthless deposed dictator of Principay Colony had chosen to fly nap-of-the-earth, rather than flat out in a bee-line to the east, and by luck Alexander had found him. Rotating the heavy laser out of its hull casing, he dove down into the corridor of high banks that stood like walls on either side of the broad, shallow river that ran east. The water shimmered in the late morning sun as it ran over a blanket of smooth river rocks. Small animals could be seen here and there drinking, keeping to the sunniest areas to avoid the Snappers; a sharp-clawed barracuda-like predator that drug its prey in with a long tongue before snapping long jaws shut.
Checking his situence glasses, Alexander saw no indication that anyone was following him. If they had been, they likely would have overtaken him now that he was following the path of the river, much as he was on track to catch up to Brutian. Having checked his rear, it was time to get down to business.
Punching the accelerator, Alexander bent forward, the encased rotors of the quadcopter leveling out to provide only lift as the pitch of the dual small jet engines’ whine increased with the additional acceleration. He’d reached an area of harder earth, so the river hadn’t cut through as much of the dirt, leaving higher banks that he mostly skipped over as he searched for his prey.
The blip ahead wasn’t passive either. Apparently Brutian had noticed that he was being followed, but the blip suddenly left the path of the riverbed and began flying straight east, leaving off any pretense of stealth.
Colonel Alexander picked up his visual scanning, instructing his situence bot to highlight anything mechanical or biological. Instantly the grass, small animals, and birds were all highlighted in a brilliant red. Muttering curses, he recalibrated his instructions to include only mechanical devices as well as animals with an estimated mass over fifty kilos. Immediately all the highlighting disappeared except for a red triangle around something about two kilometers ahead of him—something that was maintaining a speed almost equal to his own.
Though it wasn’t impossible to do, it was difficult for Alexander to slave the targeting system of the jet quadcopter to his situence glasses, tying the targeting bot together with his situence bot to come up with a firing solution for the on-board heavy laser. It took a couple of minutes, but by that time he had closed the distance by a hundred meters or so. It wasn’t much, but every bit of range counted. Besides, the target hadn’t received any fire at this point and so had grown lazy, leaving off the zig-zag it had been doing in favor of pure speed.
Steadying out his own flight pattern, Alexander waited for the odds-meter on the reticle that his situence bot projected on his glasses to hit a twenty-percent hit probability; obviously his bot wasn’t confident of the heavy-laser’s accuracy at this range when mixed with a flying quadcopter and a dodging opponent. The mounting job wasn’t exactly dog-fighting quality either, but it would have to do. With a look of determination, he slowly depressed the firing button. Instantly the report of the laser cycling added a hollow thump to the jet engines’ whine.
Ahead of him, Alexander noticed no difference in his target as he steadied his flight pattern and prepared to fire again. Three shots later, however, there was an obvious change; the target had dropped to the deck, diving down into the riverbed again. The drop looked precipitous, but he doubted it had been a crash caused by a laser strike.
Ever cautious, Alexander swung wide of the potential crash-site as he quickly approached. His skepticism was rewarded with a stationary blip half a kilometer further ahead. It appeared that Brutian had tired of the cat-and-mouse game they had going and had decided to call Alexander’s hand.
That was fine with him. Even though Brutian had light powered armor on, which was as much better than Alexander’s suit of heavy plating as a solkin tank was against an armored survey truck, the colonel buzzed around him as though he couldn’t be touched.
“Confirmed. That’s definitely Titus Brutian,” the colonel mumbled to no one in particular.
A line of heavy slugs launched from Brutian’s forearm mounted gatling gun in one long rip. Alexander zig-zagged, effectively dodging the line of hot depleted uranium rounds as they lit up the sky with their tracers.
Now it was Alexander’s turn to set down. He knew he couldn’t stand against fire like that for long. Brutian had genmods after all. That miss was an indication of Brutian’s frustration, but he’d calm down and focus. If Alexander was going to win this, he knew it would have to be a battle of wits. In that area he knew he could outclass Brutian; or at least so he hoped. Wits and a hyper-velocity slug rifle against a man in powered armor wasn’t good odds. He’d have bet against himself if money was at stake, but Alexander didn’t have a choice—there wasn’t anyone else around to do the job.
“Story of my life…” he muttered as he took the snap rifle off his back and immediately sprinted for a large rock that sat at the mouth to a small ravine that led down to the river. Within moments he was down in the ravine, but he kept a small window open on his situence glasses to draw the feed from his jet quadcopter’s targeting camera. “Let’s see how he wants to do this.”
Brutian immediately surprised him. Popping up above the lip of the ravine on jump jets, Brutian let fly a stream of hot slugs, shredding the jet quadcopter and smashing the large rock he had stopped behind into sharp flying shards.
“Okay, so much for principle number one: always leave yourself a way out of a situation,” Alexander muttered as he flung himself to the dirt just in time to avoid getting shredded by the rounds that tore up the edge of the ravine, raining large chunks of dirt and small rocks on him. He waited for the rounds to stop, then shook himself out from under the clods of dirt and scurried down the short ravine toward the shallow river’s edge. He arrived at the river’s edge with the sound of Brutian’s heavy footfalls approaching the ravine’s edge. Brutian had come to check for a kill, but he wouldn’t find any.
Alexander’s mind was racing as he ran upstream away from his superior-armed and armored foe. He knew the snap rifle he carried could penetrate Brutian’s armor, but it would have to be a lucky shot. A glancing blow, or even a straight up shot to a heavy plate, would just deflect. No, he had to hit Brutian in a joint, but such a shot was a one in ten chance at best, better or worse depending on how close he decided to get to the armored behemoth.
Behind him, Brutian shot up into the sky on short-range jump jets. Knowing he was exposed, Alexander dove into the steep wall that was the left bank just in time to avoid a barrage of deadly chaingun rounds, each round penetrating deep into the dirt, splitting rock and driving deep holes with such violence that steam rose from the shallow streambed. Brutian shot forward, arcing over Alexander and coming down not ten meters ahead of him in the riverbed.
Alexander spun his snap rifle around and fired a burst center-of-mass at Brutian as he splashed down amidst the steam of his jump jets. He didn’t stay to assess the damage, but he saw Brutian fall off to one side as he scored several direct hits. It didn’t keep Brutian down for long, but it was long enough to allow Alexander to escape around the bend in the streambed.
Coming up out of the water onto the rocky sides of the shallow riverbed, Alexander half-jumped and half-sprinted from one smooth river rock to the next until he made it back to the ravine. Hearing Brutian splashing along behind him, cursing as he came, Alexander dove behind the corner of the ravine just in time to dodge the next barrage of heavy slugs as they tore up the dirt around him.
But then, from back in the direction they had come from, a series of heavy laser bolts struck the dirt, stream, and rocks erratically just beyond Alexander where Brutian was advancing. Though Alexander didn’t know who was firing, it was obvious to him that their primary aim was to distract Brutian and give him some time to escape. He took full advantage of the distraction and started running up the ravine toward an outcropping of rock.
Apparently Brutian figured out the shooting was just a distraction as well,
because it was then that Alexander heard jump jets yet again. This time he popped his head out just long enough to get a sense of Brutian’s trajectory. Ducking back under cover, he smiled. That last hit had obviously enraged Brutian and the distracting fire had given him something else to focus on as well—the dual effects made him reckless. Brutian was about to make a mistake.
Alexander pulled a small metallic sphere from his backpack. Pressing the arming code, he reached up above the lip of the ravine and rolled the globe a few feet before sprinting for all he was worth back to the streambed.
With the sudden eruption of the thermobaric grenade, the entire lip of the ravine collapsed as Brutian landed, sending shattered rock, dirt, and clumps of grass in all directions. Alexander waited for several moments, straining to hear any sign of movement. It was a few seconds before all the rocks came back to earth, raining about the area for several hundred feet, but when they did an eerie silence settled over the place, as if nature itself was stunned by the blast.
Eventually, after several seconds of hearing nothing further, Colonel Alexander peeked over the ledge that was the high riverbank. There, not twenty meters away, was one armored glove sticking up from a fold of ground. Pushing himself up over the lip of the streambed, Alexander walked cautiously toward it, holding his hyper-velocity rail rifle in front of himself.
Behind him, Alexander heard a jet quadcopter landing near the ruins of his quadcopter. Stealing only a quick glance backward, he saw Jim Ryker dismounting and approaching quickly with his blaster pistol at the ready. Alexander waited for several moments, letting Ryker catch up.
“Thanks for the help, Jim,” Alexander said as they both started forward slowly, absolutely focused on the smoking form in the fold of earth in front of them.
“You know I couldn’t let you have all the fun,” Ryker quipped, not taking his eyes or his overcharged blaster pistol off their foe.
The pair came up to where they could see the still-twitching form of their adversary. Commander Titus Brutian, dictator of Principay Colony and the cause of all their problems, lay writhing on the ground, gasping for breath. His powered armor was a shattered wreck; shreds of it lay about him, encasing him partially in the ruined remnants and smoking remains.