Zeta Hack: A Paranormal Space Opera Adventure (Star Justice Book 3)

by Michael-Scott Earle

  “We aren’t going to--”

  “I’m talking to the big guy. Hey,” Ian Van Toreg raised his voice a bit to get my attention. “You can walk right now. I dunno how much Larns is paying you, but I’ll add a zero to the end. All you gotta do is leave her with me. You can even take the rest of these girls back with you, I don’t mind. Hey, you listening to me?”

  “Sorry. I don’t deal with slavers,” I said over my shoulder. “If I had my way, I would have beat you until your skull cracked open.”

  “Another idiot. I’m not a slaver. Just a broker. Look, I don’t mistreat these girls, and I sell them to the upper crust of society. We are talking Parliament here. They put them to work in their houses, yeah, some of them will probably get fucked everyday, but it’s better than the miserable life they would have lived being poor on the station. Hell, they’ll probably end up selling their bodies anyway. At least they’ll get put into good homes.”

  “You’re a mother fucking hero,” Z spat.

  “Thanks.” The man chuckled. “I’ll make sure my boys keep you and Officer Larns alive. We’ll have some fun with you before we sell you.”

  The man’s comment made the beast scream in my ears, and I almost lost my balance. It felt like it was getting harder to keep control of my shape changing, but I didn’t know if that was because I was just tired or hungry.

  Or because he had threatened Z.

  I tensed my jaw and forced the angry growl back into my stomach. I didn’t want to lose track of my priorities here. I had to help these girls, and I had to do what Juliette needed me to do so she could release Eve.

  “Awww, looks like I pissed off your boyfriend. Maybe I’ll keep him alive so he can watch us. I’ve done that a few times. Always adds some spice. I’ll tie ya up to the ceiling by your hands, then cut off all your clothes with a razor. I put a mirror up so you can see the line of guys waiting to get a piece--”

  I turned on my heel before I could think and grabbed the man by the throat with my left hand. Everyone let out a surprised gasp when I lifted him off the ground with a quick jerk.

  Then I started to squeeze, and Ian Van Toreg’s eyes bulged out of his head like hard boiled eggs.

  “Put him down,” Juliette commanded as she grabbed my left arm. The woman pulled down on me, but it felt like she weighed ten kilograms.

  “Adam, it’s okay! He’s just a fucker. Don’t kill him!” I heard Z, but it sounded like she was whispering to me from my dream.

  “You won’t be raping anyone ever again,” I growled as my hand crushed his neck.

  “Stop! You are killing him!” Juliette said, but I didn’t fucking care. I wanted this asshole to die. He was the kind of evil I wanted to protect people from. He preyed on kids and women. He’d threatened Z, and the beast inside my soul was overruling the small part of my human mind that realized we needed to question the man so that we could find out what the explosives would be used for.

  “Ahhhhccck,” the man let out strangled choke, and I felt the tip of Juliette’s pistol push against my temple.

  “Put. Him. Down,” she ordered.

  “Don’t put your fucking gun to his head,” Z hissed at the policewoman. “You’ll make him really angry, and you don’t want to make him angry. Believe me, he gets crazy.”

  Z was right. It was taking every ounce of willpower to keep from shifting into my tiger form, and I felt like the only thing keeping me trapped in my human skin were the fingers I had wrapped around the diabolical man’s throat. The redhead’s gun wasn’t helping me keep control, and the beast demanded I let it take over so it could handle this situation with fang and claw.

  “I’ll do whatever I--” Juliette started to say, but his neck snapped with the sound of cracking wood, and it cut off her words.

  “Fucking--” she moaned as I dropped the man’s lifeless corpse onto the dirty street. “Why did you do that? I needed him!”

  “Get your gun out of my face.” I faced her so that the barrel of her pistol was in between my eyes.

  “You just blew the operation, and--” Juliette stopped speaking as she looked into my eyes. Her mouth hung open, and her green eyes widened. She closed her mouth with a snap, opened it again, and then lowered her gun from my face.

  “Hey!” a voice screamed from behind us. It was the man who worked inside of the noodle shop some forty meters away from us where Z had hastily bought a meal. The man was leaning out of his booth and pointing in our direction. “They killed Ian Van Toreg! Help! Help!” he shouted as he darted from inside the stand, twisted around a trash bin, and then started sprinting away from us.

  “Let’s move,” I growled to the women as I chased after the apron wearing man. The street was empty around us, but the noodle chef was moving toward cross traffic on the street. I was gaining on him, but it became apparent that I wasn’t going to be able to reach him before he got to the group of five men smoking cigarettes beside a brothel.

  For half a moment I wondered if the men were gangsters working for Ian Van Toreg, but then they saw me chasing after the cook, and they pulled out their pistols.

  I jumped into an alley on my left as they shot at me. I was still a good twenty meters away, so all of their shots missed. I pulled out both of my pistols and ducked back around the alleyway corner to aim at the group. Two of the five men took cover around the corner of the alley where they were smoking, but the other three were crouching on the sidewalk. They weren’t even bothering to take any sort of cover, and I figured that the men had probably never received proper training.

  The people on the streets were screaming, and I could hear the small crowd run to my left, away from the sounds of the gangster’s bullets. Our escape might have been easier with Ian Van Toreg dead, but now these five men knew we’d killed him so I would have to deal with them quickly, and then hope we could escape with the wave of citizens fleeing the battle.

  I almost didn’t need to aim my pistols. I had been a good shot when I was in the Marines, but the experiments had added an unnatural affinity to my hand-eye coordination. My handguns kicked back at the same instant as I pulled the trigger, and the pair of bullets took two different men in the chest. They tumbled back against the brick wall of the brothel with a spray of blood, and I ducked back around the edge, as the other three men began to return fire.

  I pushed my back to the alley wall and then poked my head out after the first volley passed. Juliette was lining up a shot and had a good angle on the men leaning out from the alley. I didn’t see Z or the teenage girls, but I also didn’t see any of them laying on the dirty street, so I knew they had made it to the alley behind the redheaded cop.

  I ducked back undercover a moment before the three gangsters shot at me again. I heard Juliette’s gun bark from the next alley over, and a man screamed a second afterward. I spun out from around the corner and squeezed the trigger on my left gun. My bullet found the skull of the last crouching man and the slug lifted him off his feet.

  I didn’t have a shot at the last two men in the alley, so I strafed around toward Juliette’s position so that I could get a better view down the alley. One man was injured, and the other was trying to run away. A bullet from my right gun took the runner in the back and sprayed half of his chest across the far wall.

  The injured man had dropped his gun when Juliette shot him, and he was in the process of reaching for it. My left pistol shouted an objection to his movement, and I felt the massive slide yank back pleasantly against my grip. The bullet turned his chest into a hole, and he crumpled like a dead roach.

  “Move,” I ordered as I holstered my weapons in my coat.

  “Come on, girls,” I heard Z say as she herded the crying women out of the alley. The girls looked at me with absolute terror on their faces, and I wondered if they would mentally be able to handle the rest of our journey. We were almost a kilometer and a half from the train that would take us back to the harbor, but I didn’t know how many more assholes would stand in our way.

  T
hen I heard the sirens.

  “Shit. The fuzz,” Juliette moaned.

  “Aren’t you the fuzz?” Z shouted over the alarm.

  “Yep, but these guys are on Ian’s payroll. We need to run.”

  “Go! Run!” I shouted as I picked up my walking pace. Then I was sprinting, but I had to slow my pace, or I’d get too far ahead of the seven women.

  We were still behind the tide of running citizens, but we were getting closer to the end. I hated the idea of running inside of the mob, but I figured we could lose the cops if we looked to be part of the crowd.

  A good three hundred people were crowding in the streets ahead of us, and they began to pour into another major avenue that ran parallel to the tube tracks. It was a T intersection, and most of the crowd stampeded to the right.

  “Left!” Juliette screamed over the crowd and sirens.

  I pivoted in the other direction and pushed through the crowd of bodies trying to head past me. Even when I wasn’t in my tiger-man form, I was a tall man with broad shoulders, so most of the people bounced off me as they ran. I glanced over my shoulder a few times to ensure the women I escorted didn’t get caught up in the crowd.

  Then we broke through the mass of people, and I turned to check on them.

  “Where is Z?” I asked the other six women. My heart was suddenly hammering in my chest, and the beast in my stomach began to growl.

  “Uhhh. She was right behind me,” one of the girls said as she looked back into the crowd.

  “Wait here.” I stepped toward the mob, but then felt Juliette’s hand on my arm.

  “Leave her. We have to get back to the ship. She’s a big girl and can take care of herself. She can take a tube back to District B.”

  “I don’t leave my friends behind.” I glanced down at her hand and then gave her a cold stare.

  She matched my glare with her green eyes, and I almost thought I was going to have to yank my arm away, but then she let me go and sighed. “Okay, we’ll move to the tubes and try to get back to the harbor. We aren’t going to wait for--”

  “Hide in that alley over there.” I nodded to another side passage between two buildings. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Wait, damn it!” she shouted as I tore loose of her grip and charged back into the crowd.

  I was swimming in a sea of people, and they were all pushing the same direction I was trying to go. The beast in my stomach screamed louder than the siren, and I felt like it wanted to tear through all the people until we found Z. I called her name, but I might as well have shouted into one of the Jupiter storms. I couldn’t even hear myself over the sound of the people trying to escape and the sirens.

  I saw someone go down under a swarm of people and I pushed through the throng to reach them. It was an old man, and I yanked him to his feet before he could get trampled to death. The man opened his mouth to say something to me, but I couldn’t hear him. I saw a young woman fall into the crowd to my left, and I plowed through the mob of people to reach her. The woman was holding onto a baby, and I got her up before either of them were harmed.

  Damn it, I did this by killing Ian Van Toreg. I should have had better control of my rage. I shouldn’t have strangled him. His words and threats were just empty, and I’d let them anger me because he’d said them about Z. I needed to get better at controlling the beast in my DNA, or I knew I would end up making a mistake that would cost one of my friends their lives.

  Maybe it had. Maybe Z had been trampled by the crowd, and she was dead on the street here. The thought made a roar escape my mouth, and it sounded like a tiger’s trumpeted rage. My voice carried over the blaring siren, and the throng of people surrounding me stopped moving to stare.

  Then I saw Z’s hand pop up into the air about fifteen meters from my position.

  She was deep in the sea of bodies, and I guessed she must have gotten knocked out of our caravan almost as soon as we entered the mob. She was trying to swim to me, but it was apparent that she couldn’t muscle her way through the flow of traffic. If anything, it seemed like she kept getting carried farther away from me as I tried to get closer.

  “Adam!” I thought I heard her yell as she waved her hand in the air again. Her cry made my adrenaline surge, and I tried to muscle through a thick cluster of people between us. My movements accidentally knocked over a pair of older women, and I hauled them back to their feet before I continued.

  The action cost me precious time, though, and I couldn’t find Z when I turned to the spot she had just been. It made me want to scream, and my beast begged to be unleashed so it could murder everyone in between us. Its demands were easier to resist because I knew these people were only trying to flee to safety, and they didn’t deserve to die.

  I saw a flash of blonde hair out of the corner of my eye, and I turned toward it. The woman wasn’t Z though, and I swung my neck around again to try and spot her through the crowd. I saw someone with tattoos on a shaved head, and while Z’s hair had started to grow over the half of her scalp, I still turned toward the brief flash of color. It wasn’t her, and I looked through the crowd again.

  “Adam!” I thought I heard her call from my left, and I turned to see her trying to thread through an endless rush of people. She was about five meters from me, and I pushed aside a group of men so that I could reach her. The crowd almost took her from me again, but she reached out with her hand at the last moment, and our fingers grasped each other.

  I pulled Z through the crowd and wrapped her in a protective embrace. For a few seconds, neither of us moved as we held each other. Her face was buried into my chest, and I could feel her panicked breaths leave her chest in large gulps.

  “We have to get back to the ship!” I yelled over the sound of the siren and the crowd. I didn’t know if Z heard me, but she did pull away from my chest and then point toward where I had left Juliette and the other five girls.

  I pivoted on my feet and felt the hacker’s arms circle above my shoulders. I figured out what she wanted a moment after her hands locked around my neck. I squatted down so Z could wrap her limbs around me. I supported her legs with my hands so that I carried her in the “piggy back” position, and then I pushed through the chaotic crowd.

  A good deal of the dense traffic had moved past our position, but there was still a good chunk of people racing to go the other direction. I realized that there were way more people here at this intersection than what I first observed on the street. Where did they all come from? Why were they all running in this direction? I guessed that they came from the buildings or homes lining the streets of the district, but I had first guessed there were only a few hundred on the streets, but now I swore there were thousands of people trying to evacuate.

  I busted through the last wave of panicked citizens and sprinted toward the alley where I told Juliette to hide. I didn’t see her when I first entered the darker space, but then I noticed the coat of one of the school girls poking out from behind a trash bin.

  “We are here. Let’s get a move on.” The siren wasn’t as loud in the alleyway, and I didn’t have to scream at them.

  “Took you long enough,” Juliette said as she rose from behind the bin with the other girls. The redhead glanced at me, then Z, and she shook her head with obvious annoyance.

  “Why is everyone running in that direction?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” the redhead said. “They should be staying in their homes until security arrives.”

  “How long does it take the cops to get here?” Z asked. “It’s been more than a few minutes.”

  “Listen, I don’t run this district. We have standardized procedures, but this might as well be another world for all I care. All I cared about was saving these girls and bringing Ian Van Toreg to justice. Now I can’t do the latter.”

  “Oh, I’m pretty sure that fuck was brought to justice. He’s rotting in whatever hell there is for slavers,” Z said.

  “We need to get to the tube,” I said as I looked out the corner.
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  Then I saw the reason all the citizens were running: There was an army of soldiers wearing full riot gear marching down the street.

  “Shit! Get back behind the bin!” I pointed into the depths of the alley.

  We retreated again, and then tried to conceal ourselves behind the trash bin. The container was actually a combination bin and compactor, and it was mounted to a disposal tube on the bottom. It meant that I couldn’t push the bin out from the wall and turn it so the wide side faced the opening of the alley. So the eight of us did our best to press into the small space behind the metal. It would be fine as long as no one decided to walk a few meters into the narrow passageway.

  “What did you see?” Z whispered, but then she gasped when the first row of marching police passed the opening of the alley.

  Then a second row passed.

  Then a third, fourth, and fifth.

  “Hmmm. Jalex must have all of his people out here right now,” Juliette muttered.

  “Who?” I asked as another row of black armored soldier looking cops marched past us.

  “My counterpart here,” she said. “I counted two hundred and twenty so far. That’s a third of my entire force. He got them loaded up in riot gear really quick.” Her jaw formed a hard line and our eyes met in the dim light.

  “He knows something is going on,” I said.

  “Yep,” she agreed with a sigh. “It has something to do with the explosives. If only we had someone alive to interrogate about what was going on.”

  “I lost control,” I admitted. “I’m sorry I messed up your plans.”

  Juliette’s eyes opened wider for a few moments, but then she nodded and cleared her throat. “Yep. You fucked up, but I guess I shouldn’t blame you. He was a fucker.”

  “Looks like that’s all the cops,” Z said as she nodded to the street. “We should try to get out of here and--”

  Her words were cut off by the sounds of gunshots coming from the direction the police were heading. The noise punctured through the siren like rolling thunder, and I felt my chest tighten.

  “What the fuck? Are they shooting people?” Z asked Juliette.