by Kyle Noe
Milo followed her, weighed down by equipment. He hit the edge of the roof, scrabbling for purchase, nearly falling to his death. Quinn managed to grab his wrists. Teeth bared, she pulled him back onto the roof.
“You owe me,” she said, as he collapsed alongside her.
“Keep a tab.”
The pair darted ahead only ten paces before they came under a withering fire. Taking cover behind a small forest of air-conditioner piping, they looked back to see dozens of resistance fighters shooting at them from the building they’d just left.
Bullets kicked up all around, whining off the metal piping. Quinn returned fire, but there were more resistance fighters than rounds in her rifle. She sucked in a breath, realizing they were pinned down. She cued her helmet.
“Hayden? Do you copy?”
A short burst of static followed, and then Hayden was audible.
“You hit your target?” he asked.
“Affirmative. Where are you and the backups?”
“Fuck you, Quinn,” he said chuckling. “We’re doing the heavy lifting while you two are up in the penthouse.”
“We need evac,” Quinn said.
“We ain’t there yet. How’s your position?” Hayden asked.
“We’ll be overrun in seconds.”
“Any tricks you can pull?’
Quinn looked over at Milo, who was smiling.
He pointed down to the compact grenade launcher they’d taken off the body of the fallen fighter back in the building.
“We’ve got one trick up our sleeve, Gunny,” she said, to Hayden.
“Do what you can and meet us on the flat lands.”
She killed her comms and glanced at Milo.
“Does that thing even work?” Quinn asked, pointing at the launcher.
Milo checked the weapon. There was a high explosive round lodged in place and ready to go.
“At the very least, this’ll buy us some cover,” he said.
Quinn rolled over and looked back as Milo crouched and triggered the grenade launcher.
There was a puff of smoke, and then a rocket flew out of the launcher. It slammed dead center into the other building and exploded.
Nothing significant happened for several seconds.
Milo and Quinn’s hearts sank.
Then, they saw an entire floor collapse, pancaking onto another floor. In an instant, a chain reaction had broken out, and the entire building folded up like a jackknife before falling straight down, taking the resistance fighters with it as a mushroom cloud of dust and debris rose up into the air, turning dusk to midnight.
Milo and Quinn stared at the spot where the building once stood. Their eyes hopped to the still-smoking grenade launcher.
“What the fuck was in that thing?” Milo asked.
“I say we don’t wait around to find out!” she said, and ran.
He tossed the launcher to the ground, then was at her side as Quinn hurtled the gap between buildings. When they landed, they stood together on the other roof. Quinn turned to speak to Milo, when she heard a whistling sound coming in fast. A mortar!
“Milo,” she shouted. “Take cover.”
They felt a trembling sensation underfoot.
Then the roof gave way, and the two vanished from sight.
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Thunderstorm
A thunderous screech rattled Quinn’s eardrums as she and Milo rode the wreckage of the building straight down.
The roof hit the next floor, which bent and gave way in sections. Quinn dove and grabbed onto a section of metal girding as Milo did likewise. Milo was shouting at Quinn, but his voice was lost in the clamor. She covered her head as the floor rushed past in a spongy blur, her battle helmet protecting her from blows struck by chunks of debris that flew in every direction.
Quinn fell through one floor after another, the dust from the collapse so thick it was like being in the middle of a sandstorm. And then, as quickly as it began, everything came to a crashing stop, the force of the implosion having heaved Quinn sideways like a quarter in a washing machine.
Groaning, she staggered to her feet and surveyed the wreckage of the building. She was standing on what was left of the fifth floor in the building.
Milo was nowhere in sight.
She checked the HUD on her helmet and could see his IR image. He’d fallen one floor below.
“Milo?” Quinn said.
There were a few seconds of silence, and then he responded. “I’m here.”
“How bad?” she asked.
“A few nicks, but no worse for wear,” Milo said.
Quinn took this in, and then she turned off the comms in her helmet.
She knew this was her chance, her one opportunity to find the second object for Cody.
She reached into a pocket and pulled out the tiny computer chip that Cody had given her. She inserted it into a port on the side of her battle helmet. There was a buzzing sound, and then a map of Earth was visible on her HUD.
Quickly, Quinn sifted through the map and found her current location.
The second temporal totem was only four blocks away.
If she was smart and fast, she could locate the object and be back in time to rendezvous with Milo, Hayden, and the others.
It was a risky move, but one she was willing to take if she had any hope of defeating the Syndicate and getting back to her daughter.
***
Guided by her HUD, Quinn heaved herself across the broken room and slithered through a smashed doorway. She found a bent staircase and descended, listening to Milo’s shouts as he called out for her.
Soon, Quinn had reached the bottom of the building. She pulled herself through a window and dropped to the ground in an alleyway.
The streets were deserted, and for that she was grateful. Taking off at a trot, Quinn breezed down the alley, making sure to keep herself as inconspicuous as possible. She spotted forms out on the periphery, hidden figures skulking in the ruins of a string of buildings that had been destroyed during one of the Syndicate attacks.
In the distance was the sound of explosions and small arms fire. Close and drawing closer. She cued her HUD and ascertained that it was Hayden and the others, working their way up toward where Milo was. She only had ten minutes, maybe less, before the rest of the Syndicate Marines reached the other building.
Sliding across the hood of a junked sedan, Quinn dropped low and spotted the structure where the map told her the second temporal totem was hidden.
It was a bank that remained intact.
She stayed in a crouch, waiting for any sign of movement in the surrounding streets. Seeing nothing, Quinn leaped forward, then jerked as bullets kicked up all around her.
Snipers!
She dove forward and tasted the grit from the road. More bullets pelted the blacktop and she was forced to roll to her left, under the safety of an abandoned school bus.
Her rifle came up and Quinn looked back.
There were maybe thirty yards of open space between her and the bank.
Leaning out, Quinn searched the buildings for any hint of the snipers, but nothing appeared to her.
C’mon, she thought. You can’t sit here, you can’t wait forever. Do something!
She crab-walked back and rose, still using the bus as cover. A gunshot rang out, and Quinn spotted a flash on a building up and to the right.
Quinn pulled up her Parallax rifle and fired a burst that blew out several windows. There was no return fire, so Quinn pivoted and galloped across the open ground. She was ten paces from the bank when the building’s front windows exploded in a hail of glass, hit by the sniper’s bullets. Quinn didn’t slow, choosing instead to jump headfirst through the window, smashing it in.
The armor protected her body from lacerations, and Quinn soon found herself on all fours inside the bank.
Quinn wormed through the debris on the ground, then pushed herself up and hugged the far wall as the sniper continued to fire at her.
Tiptoeing to h
er right, she spotted a rear door and moved to it. The door was locked, so she shot the knob off and kicked it down. Darkness greeted her, and Quinn cued her battle helmet’s LED beam.
She moved through the blackness, then stopped short.
There was a loop of wire, a metal leader, strung across the floor just above her ankle. She looked left and right to see that the wire was connected to two blocks of explosives.
A booby-trap. Quinn stepped over the wire and continued on, moving past the looted interior of the bank and down a short flight of stairs. She met a landing and continued to a bottom level, where she found the oversized door to the bank’s vault.
The HUD told her the temporal totem was stashed inside the vault.
Quinn knelt and fired at the vault doors, but her rounds simply dented the metal, without blasting it apart.
There was only one thing to do.
She jogged back up the stairs and gingerly plucked the wires from the explosives tethered to the booby-trap. Gathering everything up, she headed back down to the vault and placed the explosives on either side of the heavy door, then hooked them up to the wire leaders. She took cover, positioning herself before pulling back hard on the leader.
The explosives blew the door off its hinges, the blast showering Quinn with debris.
She darted through the smoke and detritus of the explosion, fighting her way into the interior of the vault. She threw open safe deposit boxes and found the temporal totem hidden inside of one, covered in silk cloth.
She placed the object in an ammo container inside her rucksack and retraced her steps, flying up the stairs and back toward the lobby of the bank.
She neared the shattered window when a form stepped before her.
A small form holding a rifle.
A teenage girl.
“Stop where you are and drop your weapon!” the girl shouted.
Quinn reflexively pulled her rifle up, aiming at the girl’s forehead.
“You drop it!” Quinn said.
“I asked you first!”
Quinn didn’t move. Neither did the young girl, who Quinn surmised was no more than thirteen, maybe fourteen years of age. She was aiming an old, bolt-action hunting rifle at Quinn.
“Were you the one that shot at me?” Quinn asked.
“Bitch, you’d already be dead if I was,” the girl said.
“You’ve got a lip on you,” Quinn said.
“And an itchy trigger finger,” the girl said.
Quinn smirked. The girl reminded her of herself at that age. “How old are you?” Quinn asked.
“Old enough to cut you down.”
“You in the resistance?” Quinn asked.
“Maybe I am. What about you?’
“I’m a Marine.”
“Bullshit,” the girl said, moving to her left, gun still trained on Quinn. “Marines don’t wear invader gear.”
Quinn’s eyes dropped to her armor, remembering that she looked like a Syndicate soldier.
“How much did they pay you to turn on us?” the girl asked.
“They aren’t paying me anything,” Quinn said.
“So you’re doing it for fucking free?” the girl asked.
“It’s not that simple.”
“Yeah, well, it’s gonna be real simple when I execute your ass,” the girl said.
“Drop your gun, kid,” Quinn said.
“Fuck you, traitor.”
“It doesn’t have to be like this.”
“Can’t be any other way.”
Quinn thought back on Cody firing the gun at Renner. Her eyes locked on the barrel of the hunting rifle. She grinned.
“Shoot me.”
BOOM!
The girl fired at Quinn. The sound of the shot ricocheted off the bank walls, the round from the gun slamming into Quinn’s chest. It hurt like a bitch, but bounced off the Syndicate armor. The girl’s eyes widened in shock, and Quinn used the moment to lash forward and punch the girl in the jaw. The girl fell to the ground, unconscious, and Quinn hurtled her body and hooked a right, running down the street as the sniper from before opened fire once again.
Quinn hip-fired her Parallax rifle, shattering windows. She blitzed down a sidewalk and jumped over the charred remains of a motorcycle. She saw smoke rising in the distance and checked her HUD. Hayden and the others were just up ahead.
Peripherally, Quinn caught sight of forms, dark cutouts moving to intercept her. There was a whistling sound overhead and then a grenade burst in the air. Quinn dove behind a fallen streetlamp and fired several bursts from her gun at the attackers.
More resistance fighters appeared, better armed, shooting at her from various angles. Quinn peeked up and fired back, nearly losing her head as resistance rounds snapped by her position.
Then hands grabbed her.
Quinn flinched, bringing her gun up into the face of Larry the alien. He was hunched below a pile of rubble from a shattered building. One of his talon-like fingers was pressed to what passed for his lips.
“Stay down,” Larry said.
Larry cradled an oversized, cylindrical rocket launcher. He triggered the weapon, lobbing grenades across the street where they destroyed the resistance position.
“Can you run?” Larry asked.
Quinn nodded.
“Try and keep pace,” the alien said.
What followed was a frantic race as Larry led Quinn through the heart of the city. The alien was short and squat, but he moved like a deer, able to catapult over cars and off walls like a parkour expert on steroids. Quinn felt the rush of air as she followed Larry’s lead, clipping over the ruined blacktop as the resistance fighters gave chase only to fall behind.
She could see several gliders circling up ahead, just above Hayden and the other Marines. Milo was there too. She’d have to lie to him about what happened, already spinning a story in her mind about how she’d gotten separated from him in the building during the partial collapse. There was no way she could tell him and the others about the temporal totem. Not yet. She had to see whether there was truth to what Cody said about the objects before she’d be willing to risk her neck.
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Opposites
Back aboard the Syndicate Command Ship, Quinn and Milo debriefed Marin and the other Marines, answering questions about the mission and everything they’d encountered back on Earth. Marin, in particular, was interested in the number of resistance fighters and the level of sophistication in their weapons and tactics.
Quinn never revealed what else she’d found during the operation. She didn’t tell anyone about the second temporal totem she’d uncovered, the one hidden in an ammo container inside Quinn’s rucksack. That information getting out wasn’t a risk she was willing to take.
When the briefing was finally over, Quinn grabbed her rucksack and headed down into the belly of the mother ship. She’d been told that the Marines had the freedom to move wherever they wanted, even though she believed that was a lie.
She’d been on an aircraft carrier once as a child, and the mother ship reminded her an awful lot of that. Still, the ship was an alien landscape quite literally, and Quinn shivered as she moved past Syndicate soldiers and robotic technicians who moved with eerie precision. She kept the ammo container tight to her chest, working to remain as inconspicuous as possible even as she reconned the vessel.
“Hey!” a voice shouted.
Quinn looked back to see Milo.
“What the hell happened to you? Back down in the building. We fell and then what? You flaked on me?”
“I got separated.”
“That’s what we’ve got those super-duper battle helmets for, Quinn. Makes it kinda impossible to ever get separated from anyone.”
She stopped and faced Milo.
“What’s your problem, Marine? We achieved our objective and made it out alive, didn’t we? Why the hell are you giving me grief?”
She was as surprised as he was that she’d just addressed him as if he were no one to her. She’d
never called him by anything other than his rank or name before, but this was different. She was letting him know he needed to get in line, and she realized that would bear consequence and even loss of loyalty from the person she held most dear, after her daughter. And even more so now than Giovanni.
“I was just worried, that’s all.”
“I’m a big girl,” Quinn said.
“Don’t I know it. But how ‘bout you give me a heads-up the next time you decide to go off on a frolic and detour, huh?”
“You’ll be the first to know,” she said.
With a pat on the cheek, she turned and continued on, moving through the mother ship. In twenty paces she was strolling over walkways not unlike the skywalks she’d used in airports back on Earth. The walls and ceiling were made of what looked like liquid metal, the color constantly changing as alien script and messages flashed. She surmised from the bold color and images of Syndicate soldiers that the messages were probably patriotic, a way of motivating the aliens to continue to fight the good fight.
After several glass walkways and colloidal footpaths, she found herself working her way through the ship’s lower levels. One area was a vast warehouse of open metal shelving holding aisle after aisle of foodstuffs, gear, and munitions in oddly shaped containers.
The scent of bacon—or maybe sausage patties, she couldn’t be sure—wafted over from a nearby doorway, and she entered the mess hall. Instead of people serving food, there were drones that hummed and buzzed around long silver benches where hot food of some kind was being prepared.
Quinn turned up her nose at most of the food, but grabbed several pieces of fruit and dried meat. She ate while continuing on, taking mental stock of every inch of the ship, every nook, every possible hiding spot. Worried that some of the Syndicate spies might be surveying her, Quinn bided her time. It was too early to go and show Cody the second object.
Two levels down, she wandered into a room where track lighting automatically flashed on.
Quinn found herself in another gun range of sorts.
There was a locker nearby and a bevy of weapons to choose from. Just beyond this, placed in front of armored and padded walls, was a range of targets, including some figurines dressed up like Marines.