Syndicate Wars: First Strike (Seppukarian Book 1)

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Syndicate Wars: First Strike (Seppukarian Book 1) Page 19

by Kyle Noe


  She grabbed her rucksack and looked up.

  Milo was staring at her.

  There were a few seconds of silence.

  “What?” Quinn asked.

  “I was watching you.”

  “Good for you,” Quinn said, shouldering her rucksack.

  “Anything you want to tell me?” he asked.

  Tons, she thought. Everything that Cody had mentioned to her, all of the information about the temporal totems and the map and the possibility that the Syndicate wasn’t invincible. She could tell Milo all of this, but should she? She’d known him for almost two years, a trusted colleague, but could he be trusted now? Maybe he’d changed. Maybe he’d cut a deal with the Syndicate to spy on the others. Maybe he was part of that element, what was it called? Icarus? The one Cody had told her to steer clear of. Was it beyond the realm of reason that one or more of the Marines were now in league with the Syndicate?

  And even if she did trust Milo, was it a good idea to expose him to risk?

  “Yeah, there’s something I want to tell you,” she said, moving toward him. “When we hit the ground, don’t slow me down.”

  “I saw you take those pills,” Milo said.

  “Who are you? My mom?” Quinn quipped.

  “No, but I care about you.”

  “I appreciate that, Milo, but I’m a big girl.”

  She patted Milo on the cheek and then brushed past him as he called out. “Did Cody give those to you?”

  She stopped and looked back. “What if he did? Jealous? Maybe when you become useful you won't have to be.”

  “I’d be careful of him, Quinn. He’s not one of us.”

  “He’s human.”

  “But he’s not a Marine. He’s not on our frequency.”

  Quinn registered this and nodded.

  “I’ll keep that under advisement, Milo. Thanks so much. Now if you don't mind, I've got something more important than your feelings to deal with.”

  And then Quinn was out the door and moving down an inner corridor.

  Chapter Twenty-Six: You Can Never Go Home

  Quinn found Hayden, General Aames, and the others in the loading bay. While Syndicate techs loaded gear and weapons on a pair of gliders, Aames was busy prepping an order of battle. The Marines eased on their battle helmets, their HUDs springing to life, allowing them to see maps and schematics and reams of data as General Aames spoke.

  The General informed the Marines that once they’d breached Earth’s atmosphere, Quinn and Milo would parachute into lower Manhattan. In so doing, they’d avoid the area that Hayden and the other Marines would be operating in. Hayden and the others would detonate several explosions and generally bring the noise in order to deflect attention from Quinn and Milo.

  Once inside the city, Quinn and Milo would land atop a large building and evaluate whether to slip down through the building or paraglide over to another one. Regardless, they’d ultimately have to reach the lower level of an office building, where the resistance was operating an old analog station for their communications. While they were doing this, Hayden and the others would plow down the main streets outside, drawing off the resistance and neutralizing any attackers. Everyone would be extracted after the mission was complete.

  The whole operation seemed incredibly neat and tidy and too easy, especially after Quinn was given the data during the descent to Earth that revealed nearly eight million heat signatures in the area in and around where they’d be landing.

  “You seeing what I’m seeing?” she asked Milo.

  Milo nodded and looked over.

  “Seems like the survivors didn't leave. Home’s home,” she said.

  “Eight million IR signatures.”

  “Which means eight million pissed off New Yorkers.”

  Milo grinned.

  “Wonder how many of them are armed.”

  This time, instead of space diving, the glider dropped lower, cruising several thousand feet over the city, allowing Quinn and Milo to use conventional parachutes to infiltrate the city.

  The heavy cloud cover concealed their descent, so the pair navigated by HUD, popping their parachutes and piloting themselves down between the buildings.

  Quinn was on point, pulling on her parachute’s drawstrings, slipping between skyscrapers. A few gusts of wind nearly blew them against several colossal office buildings, but they were able to slide by, continuing on.

  Their speed picked up, and soon they were rocketing down through a narrow chasm that lay between the superstructures. Some of the streets in the darkened city lay in ruin, but a few others seemed undamaged. Quinn had been told that after several bombing runs, the Syndicate had ceased its aggressions, which meant millions of people from surrounding states had flooded into the city, hoping that it might hold sanctuary for them. Milo had whispered that the Syndicate was dropping food and other supplies into the city, hoping to exchange the material for information on the resistance. Quinn smiled at this, realizing the Syndicate had no idea who they were dealing with. The notion that millions of New Yorkers would ever reach any kind of agreement with an alien invader was ludicrous.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Quinn noticed a handful of people in the buildings on either side, watching them but staying out of it.

  The target building came up fast. Quinn studied the top of the structure as they glided closer, a broad, sloping plaza of cement with a rooftop door in its center.

  Quinn landed first, covered in her chute and doing a roll. Milo nearly crashed into her before executing a running stop.

  The pair ditched their chutes and grabbed their weapons, then caucused near the shadows of the roof door. Milo spoke into his helmet, and a green beam shone down from the sky as Cody sent a holographic projection to the rooftop. Milo examined the holographic map and its detailed imagery of the infiltration.

  Milo scrolled down through the holographic cityscape, mapping out the rest of their building-hopping mission, following the path of staircases from roof to basement. He stopped on an object that blinked red, hidden in the middle of a seventy-story high-rise several blocks away.

  “There it is,” Milo said.

  “That’s the analog station?”

  Milo nodded. “An abandoned radio tower, according to Cody’s info.”

  “Doubt it's abandoned now. But what do we do when we find it?”

  “We do like we always do, Quinn. We blow the fucking thing up.”

  “Let's just get this done.” Quinn reached out a finger and swiped left and right, expanding the area around the blinking object. Additional information appeared in the green light. Quinn could see that the power was out in the building.

  “You scope the route in and out?” Quinn asked.

  “Vaguely.”

  “No elevators,” she said, tapping the ground. “No power, no elevators.”

  “What did you think? That we’d just bop in from the roof, hit the first elevator we found, and ride it down to pick the damn thing up?”

  “I was simply making an observation, asshole.”

  “I have another idea,” Milo said. Milo held her look and then, looking to see if anyone was watching, leaned in close to Quinn. “We run.”

  “What? Are you insane? They’d come looking for us.”

  “So let them come.”

  Quinn, frustrated, raised her voice. “And if they couldn’t find us, they’d do things to the others. Hayden, Renner, they’d punish them for anything we did.”

  Milo pulled back, but didn’t respond.

  “Don’t you give a shit about them?” she asked.

  “Sure, yeah, I love the other guys, but at some point you’ve got to look out for numero uno.”

  “Remind me not to let you cover my six.”

  Milo leaned back and smiled, but there was no humor in his face. Quinn suspected the fog of war was starting to get to him. This wasn’t the Milo she knew, cared for, and trusted. He was beginning to break. Something had to turn positive soon, or she’d lose him. At
the moment, though, they needed to stay alive and get to the target building.

  “So if we are going through with this mission then, what do you propose, Quinn?

  She reached in her rucksack and removed a flexible glider apparatus that she shrugged on over her armor. The wings on the glider were made of a thin, almost transparent material that stiffened into shape at her touch.

  Milo fitted on the same apparatus, and the pair moved to the edge of the building and looked down.

  ***

  The wind whipped their hair as they looked out over the city. Twilight had settled on the concrete jungle, and the two watched smoke rise from small fires of gas lines severed during the attack. Bodies lay strewn across the streets, feasted on by great flocks of carrion birds. This was not the sanctuary refugees had hoped for.

  They could see the surrounding buildings were heavy with infrared heat signatures, as thousands of people had taken to safety in the city’s high-rises. Quinn had no idea how many of the signatures were civilians versus resistance fighters.

  Against the dying light, Quinn and Milo unfurled their glider wings in full and jumped.

  Quinn felt weightless, as if she’d just stepped off the edge of the world, and then the ground started rushing up to greet her.

  She pulled down on a control yoke on the right side of the glider and stabilized herself, until she was sky-surfing down and between the buildings. On her HUD, she could see the top of the target building looming in the distance, a high-rise with a parking garage fixed to one side.

  The pair drifted across the skyline, side-by-side. When they were several thousand yards away from their target, Quinn popped a tiny parachute on the top of the glider that slowed her descent.

  She and Milo expertly glided between bunchings of tenement buildings and the domes of superstructures. This was the better part of the city, the sections that had been left relatively intact during the Syndicate bombing runs. Elsewhere, the skyline was desolate, shells of buildings, broken signs, ruined bridges, and bodies everywhere, their blue-bloated corpses lying out in the open.

  And yet, survivors could be seen, innumerable, slump-shouldered forms shuffling along the desolate streets, desperate for food.

  Quinn turned from this, noticing a few spasms of electricity here and there, undoubtedly generators and solar-powered machines that were just beginning to wink out.

  The roof of the target building came into focus, long and narrow.

  They landed, then shucked their gliders and pulled out their weapons—a pair of Parallax rifles fitted with flash suppressors, a handful of ballistic grenades, and several Firestocks, a bomb the size of a baseball that Cody had said could permanently blind anyone who looked at its explosive blast. Quinn planned to use one of the bombs to atomize the target, the analog station, as soon as they found it. Thankfully, the visors in their HUD helmets would protect them from the searing light—at least, that’s what they’d been told. Quinn clipped two of the Firestock bombs on her tactical belt, magged her rifle, and signaled for Milo to follow her.

  Quinn booted the locked rooftop door open. The building’s interior was dark, desolate and spooky. It smelled of water and rot, the floor discolored and spongy. Quinn held up a balled fist and cued a device on her helmet that amplified surrounding sounds. She heard only one thing, a faint tremor that seemed to run up through the center of the structure. As if the building were sighing.

  They approached an inner stairwell, and Quinn stopped as data began downloading to her helmet. She cued a side button and saw a schematic of the floors below, with infrared images of figures moving upward. Milo looked over.

  “You reading this?”

  She nodded. “Echoes.”

  “Resistance?” Milo asked.

  “Dunno,” Quinn said.

  “How far down?”

  “Twenty floors.”

  “How far’s the target?”

  “Ten, maybe eleven floors.”

  “They’re heading directly for it, aren’t they?”

  “Looks that way.”

  Milo looked back at Quinn, but she was already on the move, threading down a stairwell, searching the interior of the building, which was honeycombed with offices. Quinn and Milo slipped through bullpens and past signs for financial services companies, the interior ransacked and looted.

  In the distance, she could hear klaxons and mortar shells going off as the Resistance on the streets and Syndicate Marines clashed. She shut the noises out of her mind and pushed on.

  They clambered down the stairs, and Quinn could tell from the images on her helmet that if they continued that way, they wouldn’t be able to reach the target before the other figures did. She stopped in front of an open elevator door and looked inside. Darkness looked back.

  She glanced up and spotted the metal elevator cables, still intact, running up and down the long, dark shaft.

  “There’s been a mission evolution, Milo.”

  Milo looked at the cables.

  “Nobody said we’d be jumping into bottomless elevator shafts.”

  “Shortest distance between us and them is right in front of us.”

  “That straight line thing?”

  “Affirmative.”

  Before Milo could respond, Quinn had secured her gear and set off on a run, then jumped at the edge of the elevator shaft. She soared through the air and grabbed the elevator cable. It was knurled in spots, meaning it would be easier to climb down. Lucky break for a change.

  Quinn’s gloves were padded, and she was able to slither down the metal cable as Milo followed behind her.

  Milo and Quinn shimmied down through the center of the massive structure, making excellent time. In moments they were one floor up from the target. They swung out from the elevator cable and onto a landing. A section of the floor up ahead had been ripped away and a window blown out.

  Eight bodies lay scattered near rocket launchers and machine guns, and Quinn realized the victims had been firing back at the Syndicate bombers through the window when they’d been cut down. Quinn nosed past the moldering corpses as Milo stopped and scooped up a compact grenade launcher with a short, wide barrel that had been dropped by one of the dead.

  Quinn and Milo hopped over the bodies and ducked into another stairwell, then hustled down a hallway. At the end of the hall was a metal door. Quinn tried the knob, but it was locked.

  “Get back!” Milo said.

  Milo fired a burst from his gun that shredded the door, tearing it from its hinges.

  Quinn’s gun nosed into the room first, then Quinn. Her eyes danced, flicking in every direction. Milo ran ahead of her as Quinn checked her HUD. The other figures were only a floor down from them now. They were closing fast. They would be on the same floor as Milo and Quinn in seconds.

  “Twenty seconds, Milo!”

  “I only need fifteen!”

  Quinn watched Milo kick down another door and throw up his arms.

  “I see it!” he said. “I see the room.”

  She followed him into a space awash with ancient electronic gear that was still visibly in use. Quinn saw old analog televisions and modems and various other pieces of equipment that she could not easily place.

  “This is what we risked our asses for?”

  Milo nodded.

  “Get back and cover your eyes,” she said. She removed a Firestock bomb and tossed it into the room as the pair retreated.

  BOOM!

  The resulting explosion destroyed the room, unleashing a flash of light that seemed brighter than the sun.

  When the blast had subsided, Quinn and Milo pushed themselves up and immediately realized they were in deep shit. The floors above and below them were crawling with IR signatures.

  CRACKBOOM!

  The wall in front of them vanished in a blinding flash of white.

  Quinn covered her head and flopped forward, rolling over, elbowing herself up as shrapnel and debris filled the air.

  Banners of smoke billowed through
the room, visibility instantly compromised. Quinn cued her helmet and saw the figures moving down the hallway outside. She snapped the other Firestock bomb from her tac belt and flung it out through the broken door.

  “Fire in the hole!” she shouted.

  There was a contained blast, and then a bonfire-bright light once again filled every inch of the building. Even with the visor in her helmet, Quinn had to shield her eyes. The resistance fighters were not as lucky, their screams rising as Quinn glanced outside and saw six of them writhing in the hallway, smoke rising from the sockets where their eyes had been burned out.

  Quinn motioned for Milo to follow, and the two jetted back down the hallway, hooking a right into a bullpen cluttered with overturned desks and ruined cubicles. Milo and Quinn flapped across the bullpen as shouts and screams echoed behind them.

  Gunfire rang out, and the cubicles in front of them vaporized in a fireball from a rocket-propelled grenade. The blast knocked Quinn and Milo to the ground, the air filled with pieces of particleboard from the ruined cubicles.

  Quinn landed on her side, grimacing, muscling herself up. The air hummed near her ear, and she blinked at the blurred shape of a bullet as it grazed her chin. Crouching next to Milo, she hip-fired her gun, flinging a wall of sabots back at the resistance.

  Two of the fighters were hit mid-stride, the sabots detonating ammunition hidden in backpacks, including what Quinn assumed were grenades that exploded, killing several other resistance fighters.

  Milo rose and tossed a grenade that burst halfway across the bullpen, scattering the remaining resistance fighters as he and Quinn crabbed back.

  Exiting the bullpen, Quinn, guided by her HUD, gestured for Milo to follow. The two met at a rear staircase and took the steps three at a time, moving swiftly to the eighth floor. Quinn kicked open a window and peered outside. She spotted a fire escape, and beyond that, sandwiched between other buildings, a high roof broad enough to accommodate a landing craft.

  That was a possible alternative exfiltration point. If they could reach that spot, they could radio for a glider to pick them up.

  Quinn was the first one out, worming onto the fire escape, measuring the distance. She planted her boots on the metal railings and launched into the air. She sailed ahead, barely landing on the lip of the other rooftop.

 

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