“Was in the process when everything went to hell,” I said. “But there has been a verbal agreement.”
“Shit.”
I saw her round the corner with her gun held down. Regina Hayes was someone I had missed greatly after everything had fallen apart. I thought she was killed at the end of the war. Seeing her standing there, in front of me, was a shock. Her long, black hair was tied back, and there were a couple of streaks of grey in it. She still had that cupid’s bow of a mouth and icy grey eyes.
“Can’t expect you not to uphold something like that, you honorable bastard.”
“Can you tell Drake to stop pointing that cannon at me?”
She keyed her throat mic. “You’re making the commander a little nervous, Drake.”
“I was commander for about ten days, Gina.”
My drone saw him grin and pull back from his perch on the roof.
“Those damn drones looked familiar,” she said as she walked forward. “Should have known who was running them. But you’re usually better at keeping them hidden.”
“Out of contact for a little bit while I was down there.”
“That explains it,” she said. “I doubt you’d have been that careless if you were in contact.”
“Didn’t expect to run into an Elite on the way to the damn port.” I shrugged. “If you’re not going to kill my charge, then I’ll let him come out of that shit hole.”
“My word, sir.”
“Come on out, Marine.”
He came out with his weapon trained on Gina. His only comment summed up the situation quite nicely.
“Shit.”
“No worries, Erik, Gina and I go way back. She gave me her word.”
He nodded and lowered the blaster. “E-Troop gives their word, they stick to it.”
“Not sure who you are,” Gina said. “How’d you place me as an E?”
‘‘Served with you and a squad of E-troops just before the end of the war. We broke out a bunch of prisoners at Reding.”
“I remember that,” she said. “Marine. Sergeant Jacobi, right?”
“That was me.”
“Didn’t have all that ink,” she said.
He nodded as he remembered what he was doing for a living less than a day ago.
“Been doing the wrong thing for a while now. Max, here, decided to let me redeem myself. If I heard you correctly, you called him Augustus?”
“Yep.”
“The Augustus Warrick?”
I sighed and motioned for the Doc who had just climbed from the sewer entrance.
“One and the same,” she said.
“Time to move,” I said. “You coming along?”
I triggered my implant and sent messages to Trebi and Corca, letting them know what was happening.
“I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
* * *
Chapter 6
“There were an awful lot of people around the port, Boss.”
The message was from Trebi.
“Shit,” I muttered.
“That doesn’t sound good,” Gina returned.
“I think they figured out where we were heading and put a few obstacles in our path.”
“What kind of obstacles?”
I sent my drones into the area. All six of them were spaced around the port. Gina had given me the drones as soon as she joined the group.
“Those fellas look familiar,” I said. “Kellogg’s guys. Kilpatrick will be in there.”
“That’s not good at all,” she said. “Simon’s a lunatic.”
“He is.” I nodded. “And he already has an itch to prove himself a faster draw than me.”
“Is he?”
“It’s touching that you have that much faith in me,” I said. “Hell yes, he’s faster. He has top of the line augments. Mine are ten years out of date.”
“Why have you let them slide?” Drake asked.
“Can’t find an operator I can trust with what’s in my head.”
“Maybe I can hook you up,” he said. “Remember Callen?”
“Thought he died,” I said as we made our way down the tunnel toward the Port. “Hell, I thought you two were dead. That’s what I get for thinking, I guess.”
“Never was your strong point,” he said. “You were always good at winning fights, though. If we’d had a couple more of you, we would have won.”
“Would have taken a lot more than that; their pockets were deeper than ours.”
“They could have come out here and stomped us. I never understood why they didn’t do it.” Gina peaked around a corner. “Some of Kellogg’s goons.”
I brought my drones into our area and landed them along the store fronts on the street. “They need to keep a ‘bad guy’ out here to keep their populace under their control.”
“Drones have six guys in the street and seven more along the store fronts,” I said. “Four on the right, three on the left.”
I sent them the targets with my implant. “I’ll take the group in the center.”
“I have the right,” Gina said.
“I got left,” Drake said.
“Erik, you’re on the Doc. He’s their target, so keep him down behind cover until I signal.”
“Roger.”
I palmed my blaster and reached to the small of my back to draw the backup. It was a bit smaller and carried less charges. There were twenty in my hip blaster and six in the backup.
“Hit it!”
The world seemed to slow down as my augments kicked in. The implant had already placed every target with the help of the drones. As I rounded the corner, I fired. The pulse charge ripped a hole in the first of the six goons. The pulse cauterized the hole as it tore through the guy’s chest. I fired the backup a fraction of a second after the first with a similar effect on the guy to his left.
Then they were moving. It looked like they were moving through syrup. Except for one of them. He’d been augmented. His blaster was halfway up as my third shot nearly severed his head when it caught the left side of his neck. The fourth shot hit him in the chest. I was five feet closer when the fifth shot took a leg out from under another goon, and a sixth hit his midsection.
One shot went wide of my position when the fifth goon pulled his trigger as he swung the blaster toward me. I heard fire from Gina and Drake, but kept my focus on the targets. It was nice to work with people I could trust, and these two had proven themselves throughout the war.
I put a shot right between the fifth goon’s eyes as I covered the next five feet at augmented speed, then placed the last shot in the chest of the last of Kellogg’s guys.
My implant had already checked off the guys on both sides of the street as Gina and Drake made short work of them.
The world settled back to normal as my augments returned to normal.
“Still a fast son of a bitch,” Drake said. “Ten years out of date, or not.”
My drones swept down the next tunnel that led to Bay 478. Then they entered the bay. Standing halfway between the shuttle and the entrance was the “Slender Man.”
“Shit.”
“What?” Gina asked.
I sent the view from my implant.
“Damn.”
I didn’t even see his hand move before he fired the blaster he drew and took out four of my five drones.
He smiled and motioned for me to come on in just before he shot the fifth drone.
“This one is on me,” I said. “I’m sorry, Doc. This may not end well.”
I cracked my neck and slipped a new charge into my blaster. I triggered my implant to red line the augments and started running down the tunnel toward the bay. I could see dust hovering in the air as my muscles and bones screamed with the pressure the augments were putting out.
As I shot through the open door, I could see his blaster rising. He was faster than anything I had ever seen.
But he wasn’t faster than light. The pulse cannon on the front of the shuttle fired, and Simon Kilpatrick
exploded in a cloud of pink mist. All he left behind was about six inches of leg above the rims of his boots.
I skidded to a halt and let my augments wind down. There was a huge hole in the wall of Bay 478, right across from where he had stood.
“Simon? Are you okay?”
The others hit the bay and found me giggling.
“Grab that giggling bastard and get in!” Trebi’s voice yelled from the shuttle.
* * *
Chapter 7
“You brought friends,” Trebi said as the shuttle launched forward from the bay. “If you’d said you were bringing friends, I would have gotten more caff.”
“Wasn’t sure if Gina and Drake were planning to join us, but there were close to a hundred more assholes closing on the port.”
“Told you, I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” Gina said from one of the launch seats. I glanced back and saw her and Drake on either side of Corca. Drake was staring at Corca in awe.
I chuckled as I realized where he was looking. Doleradi are as close to humanoids as any race I had encountered in the galaxy. They were just much bigger. Her skin was a light shade of green. He was staring at her very well endowed chest.
“Down, boy!” I said. “She’d break you.”
He jerked his head away and back toward me with a grin.
She looked over and down at him. “He is pretty. Perhaps I would be gentle with this one.”
“Jesus, Corca,” Trebi said as the shuttle jinked to the right in the crosswind. “He’s not even close to your race.”
“What? It has been a long time.”
I laughed and looked toward Gina who was staring right back at me. I swallowed and turned back to the viewport. We’d left things back then with a lot of unresolved tensions. I was the Commander of the Freedom Fighters, and she was under my command. We couldn’t even ponder anything like a relationship. Then I thought she was gone for all that time…
What the hell was I thinking? If she’d wanted to, she would have found me.
“Set course for the Eagle.”
“The Eagle? You have the Screaming Eagle?’
“Sort of,” I answered as the Ring came within view. “She’s a cargo ship now.”
“What?”
“There she is.”
The viewport was settled on a massive shape attached to the Ring.
“What the Hell have you done?”
“Had to make a living.”
I looked back and saw her shaking her head as the ship moved closer.
“She’s still inside there. Fastest damn ship in the in the system.”
“If the Eagle is inside that hunk of ugliness, it doesn’t surprise me she’s fast,” Drake said.
“Oh, she’s in there.” I grinned. “She’s under five cargo bays, but she’s there. She may not scream like she did in her glory days but she’s still the Eagle.”
We rounded the cargo bays where we could see the front protruding from the mass.
“Damn,” Gina muttered as she recognized the familiar bow. “Wouldn’t believe what that ship could do in her day.”
I tripped the comm. “Dallas, we’re inbound. Close up shop and start prepping for a run.”
“Gotcha, Boss. Is there any reason the whole damn Ring is in an uproar? Does it have to do with you coming back early? Did you start some shit and leave me on the damn ship?”
“Maybe,” I said.
“I knew it! I’m up here loading cargo, and you guys went and started a ruckus without me.”
“If it’s any consolation, we didn’t start it. Better prep four new quarters for guests.”
“You brought some back?”
He sounded way too excited. “I brought allies, not prisoners.”
“Oh.”
I shook my head.
“He sounds so disappointed,” Gina said. “Did you say Dallas? Dallas Yelvichi?”
“Yep.”
“That explains it,” she said. “He was always a little odd.”
“He’s good at his job,” I said. “Always put the paranoid one in security. He’ll find stuff no one else would even look for. I’m guessing he’ll be surprised at who we’re bringing back with us. Everyone thought you were dead.”
“After my team took out the Naval Command bunker, we had a death warrant out on us. We had to disappear.”
“The whole thing with the destruction of the Gale was faked?”
“No, they destroyed the Gale. We just escaped and took advantage of the situation.”
“You could have come to me,” I said.
“You were gone. The revolution was done.”
“I guess I was. I wanted to be anywhere but here,” I said. “Never spent much time here when I came through.”
“I don’t blame you,” she said. “You lost so much in the war. You were a damned Lord. Why you sided with the rebellion is a mystery to most folks.”
“Because it was right,” I said. “I may not have been on the winning side, but I was on the right side.”
“And you lost everything.”
“I have the Eagle.”
“And that really chapped their asses.” She grinned. Her smile was something I had missed. “You stole that ship right out of their shipyard as it came off the line.”
“Then I used it to blow the hell out of the shipyard so they couldn’t make another one.”
“She was certainly a ‘one of a kind.’”
I watched the shuttle bay door open under the nose of the ship. “She still is.”
* * *
Chapter 8
“Control, this is the cargo vessel, Eagle,” I said into the comm from the command chair. “Departure underway.”
“Negative, Eagle. Mister Kellogg is on approach and wishes to speak to you.”
“Mister Kellogg just tried his best to kill me, Control. Mister Kellogg can kiss my ass. Departing, now.”
“He still has that charming personality,” Drake said from the second gunner’s chair. “Think Kellogg will be mad?”
“Incoming fire from vessel on approach!”
“Asshole,” I muttered.
“We can dodge those missiles,” Trebi said.
“The Ring can’t,” I said. “Take them out.”
Drake began working the countermeasures.
“Would be easier if we had more than the front guns.”
“Quit your bitchin’ and shoot the damn missiles down.”
“Aye, Captain.”
“As soon as he fires, Trebi,” I said.
“Corca, Keep weapons trained on his ship. Hold fire until I say.” I waited patiently as the missiles closed the range.
“Acknowledged.”
Drake fired the countermeasures. All five missiles exploded well out from the Ring.
“Launch!”
Trebi pushed forward, and the grav plates hummed as they took the force. Kellogg’s ship was approaching much faster than it had been.
“Corca, target engines.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fire.”
The massive pulse cannon on the nose of the Eagle spouted pulse after pulse as we closed on the incoming ship.
“Engines are down, sir.”
“Head for the gate.”
“Heading for the gate, Boss.”
“Incoming transmission,” Gina said from the communications console.
“Put it through.”
“Your ass is mine, Warrick! If you ever set foot in this system again—”
“If I come back here again, Kellogg, it’ll be to bury you. You tried to kill me. I don’t take that lightly. Warrick, out.”
“Best speed to the gate, Trebi.” I eased back into the command chair.
“We’ve got another vessel that looks like it is on an intercept course,” Gina said.
“What now?”
“Incoming message.”
“Put it on. This job sucks.”
“This is the war vessel, Kyoto, of the Empire. You will surrender you
r charge, Kaito Horas, to us, or you will be boarded, and he will be taken by force.”
I silenced the viewer. “Are they able to intercept us?”
“Yes, we won’t make it,” Trebi said. “He’s a lot closer to the gate.”
“With all due respect to the Empire, you are welcome to join Kellogg and kiss my ass. Warrick out.”
“Give me scans of that ship as soon as possible, Gina.”
“He still has a charming personality, Drake,” she said.
“Told you so.”
“Jacobi! Get the Doc in a pod for heavy gees. Then strap into the Med Bay chair for battle.”
“Aye,” came from the comm.
“Doc, if we make it through this, you’ve got some explaining to do.”
“They’re a troop carrier, Max,” Gina said. “Probably have a ship assault crew. Why are you smiling?”
“I have a plan.”
“He has a plan?” Dallas asked over comms. “I remember the last time he had a plan.”
“Strap in, Dee.”
“Shit,” he muttered just before releasing the comm button.
“This one is secure,” Seg chittered from the comm.
“I have to say, that makes me a little nervous,” Gina said. “Dallas is worried?”
“He worries too much,” Corca said. “I like his plans.”
“Of course you do,” Trebi said.
“You know, I’m sitting right here.”
“Trebi, spin the ship slowly to put Cargo 5 toward them.”
“Oh, you evil man.”
“Make it slow enough that they don’t think about it.”
“I got it, Boss. It’s not that hard to figure out the plan. Not like last time.”
“I didn’t really have a plan, last time.” I shrugged.
“That makes so much sense now, as I look back on it,” she said.
“That’s how he was so successful in the war,” Drake said. “No one could figure out what he would do next, because he didn’t know.”
“I’m right here,” I muttered.
“I’m glad someone knows what’s going on,” Gina said. “They’ve launched the assault pod.”
“They’re going for Cargo 5, Boss,” Trebi said.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
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