The Hudathan uttered a primal roar of exultation, which turned into a howl of anguish as McKee emptied her pistol into the alien’s groin, her theory being that his body armor would be weaker in that area. Both of the Hudathan’s hands went to his crotch as he fell and lay moaning on the floor.
She scrambled to her feet, wondered what had happened to her AXE, and was pleased to see that the T-1s had been able to secure their line of retreat. But a phalanx of two dozen Hudathans was still advancing. “On me!” McKee shouted as she shoved a fresh magazine into the butt of her pistol. “We’re pulling out.”
She saw Corporal Muncy. The demolitions expert was marching straight at the enemy with a pack clutched to her chest. McKee yelled, “No!” but it was too late.
Muncy shouted, “Camerone!” and disappeared in a flash of light.
McKee’s helmet dampened the sound of the explosion but the blast knocked all of the bio bods down. Once McKee was back on her feet, she saw a blackened section of floor surrounded by a spray of red and chunks of raw meat. Thanks to Muncy, they had a chance. “Back!” she shouted. “Into the elevator.”
As they turned and ran toward the lift, McKee spotted a roundish something and realized she was looking at Jivv’s head. A short detour was required to retrieve it. Then, with the football-sized object clasped to her chest, she ran for the elevator and was the last person to board. It jerked into motion. “We have less than five minutes,” Yamada said grimly. “That’s when the charges will blow.”
Would twenty-six charges be enough to do the job? McKee had doubts. But why place sixty if less than half that number would do? Still, effective or not, she didn’t want to be around when the big bang came. “Roger that,” she said. “I’ll race you to the jungle.”
That got a couple of chuckles, and she wondered if she was channeling Hux again. The lift came to a stop, and they stepped out onto the top of the dam. The Hudathans had pushed Avery and his force back by then and controlled three-fourths of the surface road. McKee could see that Avery needed to disengage, had to disengage, but couldn’t. Not before the charges went off. “Hey, Larkin,” McKee said. “Catch.”
Larkin raised his hands just in time to catch the head. “What the . . . ?”
“Take good care of it,” she ordered. “And get everyone off the dam. That’s an order.”
Then, having turned her back on him, she ran for the nearest AA battery. The gun tub was mounted on a twelve-foot-high steel column. A Hudathan-sized ladder led upwards, and as she began to climb, she knew the seconds were ticking away.
A dead Hudathan was slumped against one side of the tub, and it took all of McKee’s strength to push his body out of the way. The battery consisted of four gang-mounted energy cannons all pointed at the sky. After stepping in behind a pair of curved shoulder rests, McKee tilted the barrels down to bear on the road, only to encounter a mechanical stop.
A safety measure no doubt intended to prevent an excited gunner from firing on the top of the dam. McKee swore steadily as she searched for a solution. After some trial and error, a single pull on the correct lever removed the obstacle. Once the weapon came down, and the road appeared in the holo sight, it was a simple matter of stepping on a pedal. Blips of blue light shot out to converge on the Hudathan troops. There was no sound to speak of, just a steady whine, as dozens of enemy soldiers fell. “This is McKee,” she shouted into the mike. “I’m on the AA gun behind you . . . Pull back! The dam is about to blow.”
Avery’s voice was remarkably calm. “Roger that. You heard the sergeant . . . Let’s go!”
And with that, both the Droi and the few surviving humans turned and fled. McKee remained where she was for a few seconds in order to provide covering fire. Then she went for the ladder, slid to the pavement, and began to run.
* * *
War Commander Ona-Ka knew the water was coming and couldn’t stop it. The radio message from an officer on the dam had been confirmed by a ship in orbit. The dam had been destroyed, an estimated 10 trillion gallons of water was headed downstream, and would arrive in what? Four to five minutes? Yes, Ona-Ka thought as he climbed up onto the back of a tank, enough time to think, but not enough time in which to evacuate.
His thoughts turned to his clan, his mate, and their children. They would grow up cursed by their father’s failure and all because of one mistake. The same mistake Horba-Sa had been punished for: underestimating the enemy.
The humans had attempted to destroy the dam once before and failed. That, he realized, was the seed from which the overconfidence had grown. Ona-Ka turned his gaze to the city and knew the mind that had beaten him was up on the hill, waiting for the same wall of water that he was. Except that mind was about to enjoy the thrill of victory—while he suffered the ignominy of defeat.
The ground shook, and the tank rattled ominously as a giant wave appeared west of the city. It was at least fifty feet tall and was carrying what looked like black dots. Trees perhaps? Two-ton boulders? There was no way to know as the flood hit the west side of the hill and water shot hundreds of feet into the air.
As the deluge fell, the rest of the wildly churning water was forced to split in two. Approximately half of it followed the river channel down along the north side of the city, and the rest surged out onto the floodplain. That’s where twenty thousand Hudathan troops were, not to mention hundreds of vehicles and countless tons of supplies. All snatched up, tossed about like toys, and coming straight at him. The wave was tall enough to throw a shadow over Ona-Ka before it carried him away. The siege was over.
EPILOGUE
* * *
Revenge is a dish best eaten cold.
MARIE JOSEPH EUGENE SUE
Mathilde
Standard year 1841
PLANET ORLO II
A wedge of light spilled out of the bathroom and onto the floor. The room was silent except for the soft, almost-imperceptible rasp of Avery’s breathing. McKee took pleasure in the sound because it meant that he was alive. And so, for that matter, was she.
More than a week had passed since the desperate spring from the AA gun to the jungle. No sooner had the forest closed in around her than the charges went off. The sound was muffled, barely noticeable, in fact, and McKee had been disappointed. All that effort, all of those lives, spent for nothing.
Then came a shout. “Look!” someone said, and as she turned to look, puffs of smoke appeared over both elevator towers. A series of what sounded like rifle shots followed as the upriver side of the dam gave way and a wall-to-wall flood of water roared down the canyon toward Riversplit.
McKee was dumbfounded at first, then her voice was added to all the rest, and Avery plucked her off her feet. He whirled her around, remembered that others were present, and put her down again. She wanted to kiss him but couldn’t. Not then, and not for more than a week, as they returned to Riversplit and the Legion. Because even though the Hudathan expeditionary force had been wiped out, there was still a lot to do.
The Hudathan fleet pounded the surface of Orlo II for two days in an attempt to wreak revenge on the humans. So all the citizens of that world could do was dig deep and wait. A strategy that ultimately proved to be correct when the Hudathan ships disappeared into space. And what else could they do? Having already committed all of their available troops and lost 90 percent of them, the Hudathans had nothing to gain by staying.
McKee worried that the aliens would glass the planet as they left, but such was not the case. “They want Orlo II, and they plan to come back,” Avery predicted. And she figured he was right.
Then all of the people who had taken part in blowing the dam were given forty-eight hours off by order of Colonel Rylund. McKee and Avery couldn’t spend time together openly, so they did so secretly. Because of all the destruction, quarters of any kind were hard to find and incredibly expensive. But by lying, bribing, and pulling various strings, Avery had been able to secure a one-bedroom apartment for two days.
And now, as McKee lay on the bed
next to him, she found herself betwixt and between. Avery was everything she had hoped for, but now what? The question had been plaguing her for days.
She eased her way out of bed, felt cold wood under her feet, and tiptoed into the combination kitchen–living room. She was dressed in an olive drab T-shirt and panties. What Avery jokingly referred to as “. . . the uniform of the day.”
It was daytime outside, but thanks to the blackout curtains, the room was dark. There wasn’t any hydropower, not without the dam, so what electricity there was came from hastily rigged solar panels that were popping up all around the city. That meant just one light in the living area. But one was enough, as McKee opened a shapeless B-3 bag and removed Jivv’s head.
She had been looking forward to that moment for days but never been able to find the necessary time or privacy. After placing the head on a small desk, she removed a roll of tools and a pair of nanomesh gloves from the B-3 bag.
The first step was to reawaken the robot, which she did by aiming a pen-sized laser at its visual receptors and triggering a series of blips. Nothing happened at first, so she tried again, and was rewarded with a couple of blinks. A tiny servo whirred as they came into focus. “Subject 2999.”
“Yes,” McKee acknowledged, “2999.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to access your hard drive, take what I want, and destroy you.”
The machine stared at her. “That would be illegal.”
“I won’t tell if you don’t,” McKee said coldly, “and believe me . . . You won’t.”
Another series of blips produced a click and a slight movement as one side of Jivv’s face separated from its skull. The expressionless countenance opened like a door to reveal a control interface so small it was necessary to use probes on the color-coded dimple switches. A quick one-two combination produced the same sort of display that McKee had used to reactivate the T-1s after the EMP bomb disabled them.
Having “borrowed” the nanomesh gloves from a tech sergeant, McKee pulled them on. Then, with a steadily increasing degree of fluidity she began to “talk” to the robot’s onboard processor using quick, precise movements of her fingers.
Most of Jivv’s memory was taken up by the dozens of programs necessary to make the machine run. None of which were of any interest to McKee—who went straight to the remaining 5 percent. And that was where she came across video in which a man named Hans Simek was giving Jivv its orders. He had the manner of a bureaucrat and talked about murdering Governor Jones with the same matter-of-fact demeanor that one might use while speaking with an exterminator.
“The governor is more than an annoyance,” Simek said darkly. “He’s dangerous. Because if he were to defy Empress Ophelia and get away with it, other governors might follow suit. So I’m sending you to Orlo II, where you will be attached to Legion forces but free to do as you see fit. The problem will be gaining access to Jones. But once you do, be sure to eliminate his family as well. Understood?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Because if you fail, I’ll have your ass recycled into something useful. And one more thing . . . There are thousands of targets out there, and you might stumble across one of them. So scan the K list frequently, and who knows? You might get lucky. If you need help, check the A list. Every agent we have is listed there.”
McKee remembered the look on Marcy’s face as Jivv slashed her throat, and she bit her lower lip to prevent herself from crying. Her fingers danced in the air, brought up the A list Simek had referred to, and scrolled down. There it was. A complete roster of Ophelia’s spies and informers. Such information would be invaluable to a resistance movement if there was such a thing.
And the K list was of equal value. Because there were the names of McKee’s potential allies. If they were still alive—and if she could find them.
It was silly, she knew that, but she couldn’t help herself. The data blurred as she scrolled down to number 2999. And there she was: Catherine Carletto.
A search on the name Avery turned up three individuals having that name. He wasn’t one of them. And that made sense because even though the government had been keeping an eye on his brother, he hadn’t done anything to put himself on the K list prior to meeting her. And once Jivv’s memory was wiped, Avery would be in the clear. McKee felt good about that as she stuck a memory mod into an open slot, sent both lists to the storage device, and removed it.
She heard the soft slap of footsteps and felt Avery’s beard scratch her cheek as he leaned to kiss her. “Good morning . . . What, may I ask, are you doing?”
McKee turned her head in order to receive the kiss and give it back. “It’s all here. The names of Ophelia’s agents and the people she plans to kill.”
Avery sat on the chair next to the desk. “So?”
“So, we could use the information to take the bitch down.”
“Or you could marry me,” he said.
McKee opened her mouth to reply but stopped as he raised a hand. “Hear me out. We could serve out our current enlistments, save our money, and meet on a rim world. They don’t care for Ophelia out there—so we’d be relatively safe. Then we’ll start a business, settle down, and have some kids.”
McKee smiled as she removed the gloves. “You have the whole thing worked out. And you believe I would accept a proposal from a man wearing boxers and a pair of flip-flops?”
Avery’s eyes were serious. “I hope so.”
“But what about the empire? What about all of the people Ophelia plans to kill?”
“We aren’t responsible for the empire,” Avery countered. “Besides, what could two people do?”
“I don’t know,” McKee answered honestly. “But I’ve got to try.”
Avery was silent for a moment. “The odds aren’t good. But let’s say you succeed. Or someone else does. What then?”
She got up and went to sit crosswise on his lap. “Then, if you still want me, I’m yours.”
They kissed, one thing led to another, and McKee’s top was lying on the floor by the time he carried her off to the bedroom.
* * *
Jivv watched them go. It wanted to follow, it wanted to kill them, but couldn’t. All the robot could do was sit on top of the desk and wait. Subject 2999 returned twenty minutes later. This time she was naked. “Hello, Jivv,” McKee said as she pulled the nanomesh gloves onto her hands. “Say good-bye. I’m going to wipe you.”
“I want to function.”
“All of us want to function,” McKee said coldly. “But some things don’t deserve to live.” The world went black.
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