From this point on she would have to fight.
. . . .
She would have to fight.
Back at the Academy, Sharpe had rightly guessed that she would be useless in combat. Not only was she completely hopeless in simulations, but she hesitated.
She couldn't abide with the thought of violence. She just couldn't stomach it. Which wasn't so much of a problem in the Academy—there were plenty of jobs that didn't require you to grab up a gun and shoot people.
But right now, she no longer had the luxury of doing nothing.
She was Carson's last hope, or something like it.
She also did not have the luxury of planning.
She had to act.
So she did.
In the best way she could.
Though the entity reared in her mind and told her to go back, she pushed forward.
She would figure this out.
She would have to.
Chapter 19
Carson Blake
He ran forward.
They were hot on his tail. Though he could push his armor to let him soar like a bullet out of a gun, no matter how fast he ran, he came across more soldiers.
This city was large, and her security force was larger.
Soldiers were everywhere.
He couldn't hide.
He had to get to Nida.
So he powered forward with what felt like every person on the planet hot on his tail.
Despite how fraught the situation was, as he moved, he still kept the majority of his scanner’s power directed to gleaning what records it could.
Yet whether it had found anything of note was not a fact he could currently check.
He did not have the brain power left over to focus on anything save for getting away.
Ahead of him he heard more troop transports move into place.
The once drab and dark city was now powerfully lit and cast into shades of brilliant white, silver, and grey.
‘Come on,’ he whispered, ‘you can do it.’
It wasn't clear who he whispered that desperate message to—himself or Nida.
Or perhaps it was meant for the both of them. Perhaps right then he prayed with every last scrap of his strength and will for luck.
Just a single moment of luck.
He would get it. But it would require all his years of training and all his future knowledge to capitalize on it.
Chapter 20
Cadet Nida Harper
She ran towards a darkened building before her.
Whilst she understood she had to get to the Central Security Facility, she also appreciated the need to figure out exactly what was happening there before she burst in off the street.
She didn't have access to a scanner, but she did have a set of eyes, and she was now ready to use them.
Pressing her back into the wall behind her, she peeled her senses, trying to figure out if there was anyone or anything up the set of stairs to her side. Metal, large, and grey, they were some kind of fire escape.
Again she was struck with how cold everything in this city was. There was no color, save for her own.
Black, brown, grey, and off-white.
Well right now she ascended those pale silver stairs, pressing her fingers into the dark black building to her side as she climbed up.
She hoped that no one was on the roof. She hoped she wasn't about to come face-to-face with a varg.
Her fears didn't stop her though.
She climbed the final stair, waited a moment in tense silence as she listened for a disturbance before her, then finally climbed up.
She still held the gun tightly in one hand. In fact you would have needed a team of your strongest Barbarians to pry back her fingers right now.
‘Come on,’ she hissed under her breath as she ran across the flat roof.
It was made of concrete or some similar material, and had a thick wall travelling all around it, punctuated only by pipes and guttering that would keep the rain from pooling.
She travelled over the concrete as fast as she could, her footfall indistinguishable from the rapid thump of her heart.
Clutching her free hand tensely into her chest, she reached the side of the wall and immediately ducked down. Forcing herself to breathe, she also forced her back into the unyielding concrete, and used it to inch up slowly until she peered over the wall at the street below.
She still had her map, and after a quick glance, realized the Central Security Facility was somewhere several blocks away.
Instantly she spied it.
It was the one with the massive searchlights on top. Searchlights that sliced through the cold night air, their beams sweeping around in great arcs as they desperately searched something out.
. . . .
Carson.
It had to be him, right?
So did that mean he'd escaped?
Though she wanted to believe that of course he'd escaped as he was a soldier from the freaking future, she was no longer comfortable making assumptions. Assumptions had led to this predicament in the first place.
They'd trusted Cara, they'd trusted the resistance, and they'd trusted this plan.
And, despite herself, Nida had gone against her intuition.
Sharpe had once told her that she had a terrible battle brain, as he put it. According to him, she just couldn't process stimuli quick enough to figure out what to do in a combat scenario, let alone any other situation that required a quick wit, a good decision, and a gram of training.
He was right, and he was wrong.
Nida had never been in a real battle before.
Now she was in one, she was rapidly growing accustomed to it. Okay, so occasionally her eyes still itched with tears, and no matter what she tried, she couldn't still her wild heart. But the point was, she wasn't a mess.
Nor was she a coward.
Though it made her skin crawl, she shifted further over the wall until she got a better view of the streets below. She spent a few pressured seconds watching the pattern of troop movements, then rapidly realized it was concentrated away from the facility.
Though the trucks and cars coming in and depositing soldiers were doing so from every angle, Nida tried to get a bigger picture, and eventually realized where the majority were headed.
She scooted off across the roof again, keeping low and trying to be as quiet as her heels would let her.
She reached the opposite wall, peered over, and searched through the cold night.
Again she saw more troop transports, more soldiers, more lights.
But then, in the distance, she saw something else—fire.
The flash, flash, flash of guns.
She swallowed.
. . . .
Could it be Carson?
She grabbed at her map with a trembling hand, and, tracing a finger from where the gunfire was, realized it was back in the direction of the tunnels.
Carson.
She pushed herself up and swallowed hard.
If he had gotten free, and if that really was him, he would be trying to get to her.
But she wasn't back in those tunnels.
Nor could she let him face Varo again.
Though this frantic situation hadn't provided her with any time to think, there was one fact she couldn't ignore—Varo knew she was an alien.
How?
Had he seen through the disguise, or did he know far more than he'd ever let on?
She shook her head, stilled her mind, and brought out her gun.
She looked at it, flinching as she did.
She couldn't let Carson go back to those tunnels.
For all she knew, Varo could be from the future, just like them. It was a possibility that suddenly impressed itself upon her mind and stole away her resolve as it did.
He could have access to weapons, to scanners, to technology beyond these times.
She had to do something.
She walked into the center of the roof.
&nb
sp; She drew a single breath.
She brought her gun up and she shot.
One continuous blast right into the night sky.
The light of it was incredible. It was like a glowing sword parting the clouds and penetrating heaven itself.
She kept her finger on the trigger, feeling the gun heat up as she did.
After about 20 seconds, she stopped.
She hoped that would be enough to get his attention.
Because it was sure as hell enough to get everyone else's.
The search lights streaming through the night suddenly all centered on her roof.
She skidded to her knees and aimed for the stairs.
He would know it was her—or at least she hoped he'd figure it out.
Now he just had to make his way back here before every soldier of this corrupt city came streaming in to capture her.
Chapter 21
Cadet Nida Harper
What happened next happened fast.
She made her way to the metal stairway, intending to throw herself down it as quickly as she could.
It was when she reached the first step that she saw a set of black armor powering up it.
At first her heart sung.
Then it sank.
It wasn’t Carson.
Nida doubled back, getting off a shot with her gun.
The plasma blast lanced out, slicing through a section of the stairwell.
She couldn’t get off a direct shot though, and instead ended up doing so much damage to the stairwell that it started to pull away from the wall.
Nida screamed, throwing herself backwards and back onto the safety of the roof.
She made it just as the stairs fell away, crashing into the ground below with a bone-shaking clang.
She crawled to the edge of the roof, staring down, trying to ascertain what had happened to the soldier in the heavy black armor.
Though she searched the hunk of metal that was the stairs, she couldn’t see a black shape indicative of a body.
She brought herself back with a snap, her breath hard in her chest.
‘God,’ she whispered to herself, realizing how dangerous things now were.
Yes, she might have gotten Carson’s attention, but she might have also thrown everything away at the same time.
Squeezing her eyes shut, Nida slammed the base of her palm against her head.
Right now she needed the entity, she realized.
As horrible as it sounded, she needed it to surge within her. She needed it to protect her, to use its incredible power to get rid of the advancing armies, and to bring Carson back.
The entity did nothing though.
It had become completely silent.
Not a peep. Not even an itch as its energy moved within her left hand. In fact, it was almost as if it had gone completely.
Nida didn’t have time to consider that fact as she felt the building shake a little beneath her.
Her eyes drew wide.
She stumbled forward, realizing that soon enough the soldiers below would find a way onto this rooftop. She may have done a good job of trashing their fire escape, but they were desperate and armed to the teeth.
She stumbled forward, searching this way and that until she finally found a set of stairs leading down to a thick metal door.
She didn’t wait.
Neither did she take the stairs.
Instead, she set her gun to low and shot the stairwell just above the door, only pulling her finger off the trigger once an absolute hail of rubble had completely covered the doorway.
Although that was a start, once again, it wouldn’t keep those soldiers at bay forever.
But she didn’t need forever, she told herself bitterly; she only needed just enough time.
‘Come on, Carson,’ she begged.
She’d gambled that he’d seen that blast.
So she shot again.
There was nothing to stop her.
The soldiers below already knew she was here.
She shot.
Then she shot again.
And all through it she prayed and begged and hoped and wished.
But in case that didn’t work, she got ready to repel her boarders.
Cadet Nida Harper got ready to fight.
Chapter 22
Carson Blake
It was when he’d almost reached the tunnels that he saw it. In fact, it was his armor that alerted him first.
It detected a continuous, sustained blast of plasma.
The people of this time did not have access to such technology.
So yeah, Carson stopped. Turned. And stared.
He saw one blast lance through the sky, coming from a building back behind him.
His heart leapt into his throat.
He didn’t need his armor to tell him what kind of weapon was producing that blast—he’d seen shots like that enough times before.
A small hand-held plasma gun. Just like the one he’d given Nida.
He paused. Right there on the street.
He’d put just enough distance between himself and the soldiers that he had a single moment of silence.
A single moment to decide.
He knew that shot belonged to his gun, but he could not be sure of who was shooting it nor why.
It could be Nida, then again, it could be a distraction, another trap.
He heard soldiers rounding the street behind him.
He felt their footsteps, felt the crunch of tires over the road, heard their guns, heard their screams.
He had to do something.
Had to decide.
He turned.
He looked at the tunnels. Then he walked backwards away from them.
He closed his eyes. He turned.
He ran towards the light.
He would risk it.
Not because his training told him it was the smartest thing to do, but because his heart couldn’t let him ignore it.
So he ran forward as fast as he could, then faster. He pushed his armor to its limits, pushing his body within it even further.
He didn’t heed the warnings the on-board computer gave him, and neither did he pay a scrap of attention to his shaking limbs and sweat-covered brow.
He just ran to her.
If it was Nida—and his instincts screamed at him it was—then she would be running out of time.
Whilst he’d been lucky enough to see that blast, he was sure he wouldn’t have been the only one.
Every soldier in this city would have noticed it too.
And they would all be surging towards that building.
As he powered forward, he saw more flashes, more plasma blasts. Long and continuous, they all came from the same place and lanced innocently into the sky. Either someone was trying to shoot the moon from the heavens, scare the clouds, or they were trying to get somebody’s attention.
His attention.
Nida.
He came around a corner so fast, he didn’t care that there was a truck before him. He launched himself up and over the hood, his heavy boots sinking hard into the metal and denting it with the ease of a finger pushing through softened butter.
He flipped, landed, shrugged off more gunfire, and streamed forward.
If it was Nida, she had somehow gotten free from her captors . . . . Or this was a trap. They might have her up there on that roof, or they might just have his gun.
So the closer Carson got, the more he forced his scanners to lock onto the trace of that plasma weapon.
He also, on the fly, tried to recalibrate his computer to look for human bio signs.
Ordinarily a complex and laborious task—and certainly not one you preformed on the run, literally—right now he threw his mind into the task as he threw his body forward.
There was a dense tingling sensation rushing through every muscle, but Carson ignored it. He ignored the pain too.
He just concentrated on finding out if it was her.
As he neared, he faced hea
vy resistance.
It seemed that every soldier in the entire city was now concentrating around that building.
Around and in, but at least not on top.
No, there was only one life sign on top.
. . . .
With a thrill that would stay with him for life, he realized it was human.
Nida.
She was there.
Right before him.
Yet all too soon that thrill burnt away.
Another life form joined Nida on the roof.
Carson threw himself forward.
Faster than his armor could take him.
He put in every scrap of energy he had.
More desperate than he’d ever been, he tried to get to her before it was too late.
Chapter 23
Cadet Nida Harper
She stood her ground. She even took the opportunity to shoot out the searchlights.
Still, no matter how many pot shots she took from atop this building, she couldn’t keep doing it forever.
She could feel how many forces had been redirected here; every truck that pulled onto the streets below set the concrete below her shuddering. Every scream ripped through the air. Every bullet pierced through her courage.
Yet she held on.
She tried to stare down at the streets, but it was hard and it was very dangerous. She couldn’t afford to push out too far over the wall, lest some soldier below take it as an opportunity to snipe her through the head.
So she sat roughly in the middle of the roof, waiting.
She was emboldened by the fact this building was higher than any of the others around her. It had a great vantage, but it also meant that someone couldn’t climb the office block next door and line up a shot.
As the seconds ticked by, she felt more and more desperate until finally she let out a brief cry of bitter frustration.
This situation was impossible.
This mission was impossible.
Return the entity to its home?
Find a dimensional bridge?
She was alone; she no longer had Carson, and her foolish attempt to garner his attention by shooting the sky would likely come to naught.
She was the worse recruit in 1000 years. This was beyond her, so beyond her.
Yet as that conclusion rang through her, somehow she didn’t fall to her knees. Though she desperately wanted to wrap her arms around her ankles and lock her head against her chest, she didn’t.
Ouroboros- The Complete Series Page 47