“Take this next off-ramp,” I said right before the navigation system beeped for us to make the turn.
The ramp took us off the freeway and into an idealistic suburban landscape. The homes were still tightly pushed together, but they had lawns, fences, garages, and most had backyards filled with swing sets. It was an unlikely place for a Yakuza safe house, but that was probably the reason why the safe house was here.
“This was the kind of home I wanted to own one day,” I said as I looked at the homes we drove by.
“Why?” she asked.
“My mother, sister, and I lived in a tiny apartment,” I said. “This seemed like luxury.”
“Now you could own this moon if you wished.”
“Yeah,” I said as my mind thought about coming back here with my armada. The Jupiter Navy might decide to fight me, but I’d bring more than a hundred times their ships, so they would probably just surrender.
I thought about the laws I could change here to make things easier on the middle class. I thought about getting rid of the Triads and other gangs. I thought about opening up trade between the Nordar clans. Jupiter’s moons were managed by an ass-backward and slightly corrupt congress. I guessed that having a single benevolent ruler would probably make things a lot better.
Or maybe I was listening to Sivaha too much, and my ego was just getting to me.
“The house should be up here on the right,” I said after the car’s navigation system had told us to make a few more burrowing turns into suburbia.
“The one with the cream fence?” she asked.
“Yep,” I said, and we both did our best to look at it out of the corner of our eye as we drove past.
A single black sedan sat in the driveway of the nice looking craftsman style home. There was a big window on the face, but the curtains were drawn, and I could see a bulky shadow pacing against a lamp.
“It’s going to get dark soon,” I said as I leaned against the window and looked up at the distant dome lights.
“How long?” Sivaha asked.
“Hour and a half, maybe two,” I replied.
“Do you wish to wait?” she asked.
“Let me think about it,” I said. “Can you drive around the corner and try to get to the street behind? I’m thinking we should climb the fence of that house and then enter through the backyard instead of going through the front.”
“I will drive there,” she said as she ran her fingers over the navigation screen so that the images of the homes were zoomed in more.
Sivaha did a circle around the neighborhood, and I hissed with annoyance. There were plenty of kids playing in the streets, and people driving or walking home from work. This looked like the worst possible time to try and infiltrate the house, and I started to wonder if her hotel idea had real merit.
“What would you like to do, Husband?” she asked me after we completed a loop.
“Let me think for a minute,” I said, but my temples were starting to ache, and I had to fight to keep my eyelids opened. I needed to get out and move, or I’d pass out in the next ten minutes.
“The rabble is looking at our car,” Sivaha said as we drove past a man gawking at the convertible. This car seems glamorous, but broken windshield looks suspicious, and when they looked inside, they would see a man and woman wearing armor.
“Drive by the house again,” I ordered. The silver-haired woman was right. We couldn’t keep driving around, but then again, we couldn’t just park and walk to either the front or back door easily wearing armor. I thought about going to a hotel to try and plan this better, but then I recalled Kuroda’s words about me being Tiger and not trying to be Dragon. I could easily come up with a plan that involved attacking, but I was trying to play it safe and be defensive.
That wasn’t Tiger’s way.
“Drive through the front wall where the window is,” I said as I hit the button to expand my helmet. “We’ll just kill them all, grab my mother, and take their car before the police show up.”
“Understood,” Sivaha said with a husky voice, and then she pushed down on the accelerator, sped up the street a hundred meters, and made a sharp right-hand turn.
The red sports car jumped the curb, caught a half meter of air, and then slammed into the front wall of the home like a wrecking ball. It was the second car we’d driven through a building today, but I had to admit that I really liked smashing Yakuza property.
The man standing at the window felt the impact of the car, but he didn’t get out more than a surprised gasp before the vehicle hit him. I heard other shouts in the house, but I had to throw open my door and step out because the impact totally destroyed the front windshield, and I wasn’t able to see anything going on inside.
I had my left pistol drawn, and I flicked it to the side toward a Yakuza goon coming at me from the kitchen. He was in mid-reach for his shotgun, but my bullet hit him in the lower jaw first, and an explosion of teeth and blood sprayed across the room behind him.
“Aim low!” I shouted as I remembered that my mother was in the house somewhere and there were innocent families all around us.
Sivaha didn’t answer me, but I saw her spray her submachine gun at the knees of a yakuza standing up from the couch next to us. Her bullets tore holes into his legs, and he fell back before she jumped on the armrest and put one down into the top of his skull.
There was a hallway to our right, and I ducked around the crumpled hood of our sports car in an attempt to see down the length. Two fuckers were at the end of the hallway, and I ducked back down when they fired.
“Two at the back!” I shouted to Sivaha as I leaned out again and squeezed the trigger of my pistol. I tried to aim for their legs, but the men were only leaning their shoulders around the corner, so I had to guess at where their knees were and put a bullet there. I didn’t hear a scream when I shot, so I figured that I’d missed.
Sivaha turned to our left and then rolled back off the couch a moment before bullets sprayed the ruined wall. The shots had come from the kitchen, but I couldn’t quite see the yakuza’s position, so I sprinted left into the family room and pulled my right pistol out of its holster.
Two men had been posted in the backyard, and they ran into the kitchen as soon as they had heard the car plow through the front of the house. They both saw me dash across the family room, but their pistols had been pointed at Sivaha, and they were too slow to target me. Both my pistols barked in unison, and the two men slammed against the fridge when the bullets hit them. I’d shot them center mass, so I put another round into each of them to ensure that they were dead. Then I moved to the backyard so I could check for any more guards.
“Clear in the yard!” I shouted back over the sound of the two men exchanging gunfire with Sivaha.
“They are dug in,” she said calmly when I returned to the ruined car. “We can’t risk really shooting at them because we might hit your mother.”
“Yeah,” I said as I leaned out into the hallway and tried to get a shot off at their legs.
My shot went wide, but one of the gunmen’s shots didn’t and a bullet hit me in the shoulder. It knocked my torso around, and Sivaha let out a gasp, but my new armor didn’t even show a scuff mark where the bullet had hit.
“Hmm,” I said as I looked at my shoulder.
“That is never a good strategy,” Sivaha laughed as she guessed what I was planning.
“You’re right,” I said as I looked at the drywall of the front room. “But this is.”
Before Sivaha could talk me out of it, I sprinted toward the wall on the side of the hallway. I wasn’t in my tiger-man form, but I was still a much larger than average Marine wearing an armored suit. I’d easily smash through the drywall, and I’d probably break through a stud or two.
Or so I hoped.
My left shoulder hit the wall and tore through it. I did find a stud, but it snapped against my mass and ripped out of the wall as I broke through the other side. My armor again took all of the impact, and I spr
inted across the empty bedroom parallel to the hallway so I could smash through the other wall.
I got lucky with this one and plowed through the drywall in between two studs. There was an asshole in this room, but he was standing at the doorway leading out to the hall. My bullets ripped through his back before he could turn around, and I spun around the room to make sure there was no one behind me.
Then I saw my mother.
She was wearing black pants, a frilly white shirt, and a suit jacket. She was laying on the bed with her eyes closed, and they hadn’t opened with all the commotion.
She was either dead, or she’d been drugged.
I forced my thoughts away from the first option and focused on killing the rest of the men in the house. We’d taken out six so far, so the two at the end of the hallway should be the last. They had stopped firing though, and I turned away from my mother’s body so I could try and hear them. My senses were enhanced, even when I wasn’t in my tiger-man form, but I also had my helmet up, and the prevailing sound was the beat of my heart and draw of my breath.
The door to the room slowly began to open, I could sense Sivaha was still in position at the mouth of the hallway, so I knew it wasn’t her opening the door. I aimed low with both my pistols and fluttered the trigger to send a cutting wave of bullets through the bottom part of the wood. My efforts were rewarded with a scream, and then a few seconds later I heard a wheezing gasp, so I guessed that another one of my bullets had caught him in the throat.
A spray of bullets tore through the wall in the direction of where I guessed the last goon was, and I spun around with my arms out in an attempt to protect my mother. A bullet did hit me on the back right shoulder, but it did nothing more than make me stumble forward a few steps.
I felt Sivaha dash down the hallway once the man started firing at me, her presence reached where the sounds of the gunfire originated, and then I heard the Nordar woman’s gun spit an angry retort.
“Clear!” she shouted.
“I’m clear here,” I said as I pressed the button to retract my helmet.
“Is she injured?” Sivaha opened the door to my room as I lay down to listen at my mother’s chest.
“Heart is beating,” I said. “Just drugged. Search the bodies for the--”
“I have it,” she said as she dangled the key fob in the claws of her armor. “I’ll grab your shotgun from the red car and then drive the black one.”
“Thanks,” I said as I picked my mother up and made a rapid walk through the warzone. Sivaha grabbed the back door to the sedan for me, and she shut the door as soon as I sat down with my mother.
Then we were peeling out of the driveway and hauling ass down the street toward the freeway.
“She looks like you,” Sivaha said, and I looked up to see that her helmet had melted away from her face.
“She is my mom,” I chuckled as I glanced back down.
Sivaha jumped on the freeway and then dodged through a bit of traffic before easing back on the acceleration so that she fit in with the flow. I was about to tell her how to get to the spaceport, but she took the correct exchange road, and then we were heading the correct direction.
“You remember where to go?” I asked.
“I have a good memory,” she replied, and her brown eyes glanced up from the road to stare at me again. I held her gaze in the mirror for a few moments, and then she looked away so she could focus on the road.
“I’ll feel a lot better once we are on Persephone,” I said to keep the tension from growing between us.
“You killed the man who betrayed your trust, and you let him know you murdered his son before you killed him. It was a fitting punishment for those who cross you. Today was a good day.”
“It will be a great day once we get back,” I replied as I tried to think of how I would get my mother through the spaceport security if she didn’t wake up in the next twenty minutes.
“Hmmm,” she shrugged, and her eyes darted back to look at me. “I can think of a few things that could make it better.”
“I bet you can,” I chuckled.
“Care to guess?” she asked.
“I can only imagine,” I said.
“Then imagine for me, Husband.”
I could feel her desire. It practically burned through her seat and singed my skin.
“How about we do the dinner you wanted when we get back?” I asked to deflect her question a bit.
“How about we do the dinner I wanted, and then we fuck each other all night like you want?” she asked, and her brown eyes reflected off the mirror-like twin lasers.
“I want that?” I laughed.
“We feel each other’s emotions,” she said. “I know exactly what you want, and you know what I want.”
“Let’s start with dinner,” I said.
“Did I not serve you well today, Husband?”
“You did,” I said. “Very well.”
“Do you not desire me?”
I took a long breath and stared into her eyes again. I knew what I was going to say, and she knew what I was going to say. I just needed to say it.
“Yes,” I admitted as my heart slammed in my chest. “I want you. You’ve impressed me today, and I--”
“Fuck,” she growled in anger, and I saw her eyes narrow.
“Not quite the reaction I expected,” I laughed, but then I felt her annoyance flow into me, and I turned around to see the flashing lights of police squad cars.
“Fuck is right,” I sighed.
Chapter 10
“I see four police cars,” I said as I leaned my face into the tinted rear window and looked up at the sky. “I don’t see any drones, but I can only see out the rear. Do you see any in front of us?”
“No,” she answered as she leaned forward. “How far are we from the Space Port?”
“Ten minutes,” I said as I turned back to the police cars. They had all finished filtering through the traffic and were in position right behind us.
“Your shotgun will end their pursuit,” Sivaha said.
“Killing cops tends to be frowned upon,” I replied.
“All who stand in your way should pay the price,” she said. “I will use the shotgun if you do not wish to do the deed. I have no problem killing for you.”
“Look,” I said. “These aren’t bad guys. They are just people making an honest living to pay for their families. They are probably following us because they got a call about the shootout at the home, or maybe the license plate got reported as stolen. We should--”
As I spoke, a drum roll of bullets cascaded over the rear window. The glass was armored, so it didn’t break, but I saw small cracks form on the outside surface.
“Do police officers on Ganymede shoot criminals before trying to apprehend them?” Sivaha asked.
“Nope,” I replied. “Pass me the shrapnel sprayer.”
Sivaha gave me the weapon, and I popped out the magazine to check the ammo. It was half-full, and I had two more cubes on me. It would be more than enough to take care of the four cars, but I thought through the repercussions of my actions one more time.
These could have been good cops that had been told we were dangerous and needed to be taken out, but I doubted it when I saw a woman with long black hair and a tattooed neck lean out of the window and aim a heavy looking rifle at our car. Ganymede police had a “no visible tattoos” policy, and female officers were always required to have their hair in a tight bun.
She was either Yakuza, Triad, or a mercenary hired by one of the other gangs to clean up the mess I’d made. It didn’t really matter who she was or why she was trying to shoot us, all that mattered was that I needed to unite the clans and rally a defense against the Draugr or everyone in the galaxy would die.
Sivaha was right, anyone who got in my way needed to pay the price.
The woman shouldered her rifle as I rolled my window down, and she set her sights on the rear tire when I fired my shrapnel sprayer. She got her shot off first, but
Sivaha had already begun to sway our sedan, and her movements got more chaotic as soon as the woman in the police car started to take careful aim again. Our tire didn’t blow, but the woman took careful aim again.
I didn’t really need to poke my torso out of the car. I just grabbed the handle of the shotgun as firmly as I could, angled my arm out of the window toward the car she hung out of, and squeezed the trigger. My blades sprayed her body across the side of the car like I’d thrown a bucket of red paint out my window and onto them, and then the front tire flew off the axle.
Then the right side of the police car crumpled, and the thing exploded.
The blast was probably caused by a hydrogen engine mixing with the heat of the battery my shot had destroyed. One of the other police cars skidded to a halt so that it wouldn’t plow into the flames, but the other two cars dodged to the side and continued their pursuit.
That was a fucking big mistake on their part.
My shotgun barked again, and the next closest car nose planted when its front suddenly became more liquid than solid. This one didn’t explode, but it flipped over like Bosu’s had, and the vehicle slid across the road on a crumpled roof.
The third car slammed on its brakes, and Sivaha quickly put a few hundred meters between us.
“We are going to have a problem if everyone else isn’t back on Persephone when we get there,” I said as I reloaded the shotgun.
“I was just thinking that,” she said. “We will need to leave in a hurry.”
“I doubt these people are cops,” I said as I glanced back at the two squad cars in the distance. “But people are still going to see us shooting at each other, and they will call the real police. They will get camera drones in the air, and they might shut down the spaceport…” An idea hit me, and I spun it around in my brain for a few moments.
“You have a new plan?” she guessed.
“Yeah,” I said. “There is a security wall around the harbor landing zones, but there are two gates we can drive through. If we can get through the gates, it will be a straight shot right to Persephone. We can park right at her landing gear and then climb the service stairs to her gate.”
Queen of Hearts Page 17