But then I see a flicker of movement on one of Aurora’s concealed rear-facing cameras. Just now stepping up to the second-floor balcony that overlooks the living area and its view is Rina Mohinari, and her daughter, Dayani. Both are smiling as they gaze down on us.
“Welcome,” Rina says as I turn to look up at her. “I trust that you have been keeping well since we last met, Mr. Korbin.”
Of course, his wife hiring me to kill him was just another part of the plot. There was never any divorce, no custody battle.
And they’ve seen right through my disguise. They know it’s me in here, controlling Aurora.
But I’ve been expecting that.
Hopefully, they haven’t already reported me to the Syndicate for breaking the rules by hijacking Aurora’s body. I was planning to explain the situation on my own terms, after finding proof that Aurora broke the rules first by joining the Mohinaris’ plot against me.
Rama and I watch as Rina and Dayani descend a curving, icy-looking staircase to the living room below.
Rajesh joins them, rising up from a matching staircase below that one as they descend. And then the three of them come gliding across the sparkling floor to stand in front of Rama and I. All three are wearing shimmersilk clothes. Their family is a smugly unified front, content in the knowledge that I’ve been thoroughly outplayed.
I play the part and pretend to be shocked by these developments.
“You thought you were the only one who could wear different faces?” Rina asks, spreading her hands with a radiant smile.
“What did I ever do to you?” I ask, slowly shaking my head. I’m genuinely curious to know the answer.
Dreana’s background checking could only get me so far. It would have been better if I’d had a chance to do it myself, but there wasn’t time, and I couldn’t afford to be seen digging around or asking questions.
All three of the Mohinaris’ faces blur and writhe as biomasks rearrange their features. When their new faces emerge, I don’t even have to pretend to be shocked. Even Rama is rocking back on her heels.
Now, instead of seeing three people of obviously Indian descent, I find myself looking back in time, twenty-five years back in time. Suddenly, I’m back on Aqauria, lying on a canopy of red leaves, watching through the scope of my rifle as Cristophe Zabelle’s air car plunges into the shallow ocean, killing him and his daughter instantly with Nadine Zabelle looking on from the back of their hoveryacht.
“So you do remember us,” Nadine says.
She has long dark hair, green eyes, and a pale, sharply-angled face that’s hard to forget, while Cristophe has a darker complexion and blue eyes. His daughter, Bella, is a mix of them both with his skin tone, hazel eyes, and her mother’s sharply-angled features.
I knew this plot had to have been hatched by someone from my past, which is why I got Dreana to look into it as best she could, but she never did find out exactly who was at the root of it. Now I know.
“You died,” I say, looking directly at Cristophe. “We corrupted your scans.”
“So I am told...” he replies, looking uneasy with the reminder.
Nadine is scowling at me. “I managed to bring him back, but he’s never been the same. Bots never are, are they?”
Her daughter glances at her as she says that. She looks the same age that she did when she died. Forever a teenager. Forever her mother’s child.
Nadine is even more twisted than her elaborate plot against me implies.
“Why?” I ask.
“To deprive you of your daughter, the way you deprived me of mine.”
Rama looks confused with that revelation.
“Don’t look so hurt, child,” Nadine says.
“But you raised me! I’m like a second daughter to you. You said—”
“Hardly!” Nadine laughs. “From a distance, I paid for your foster care, to train you, feed you, and clothe you. All in preparation for this moment, when you would be brought to me on a platter by your own father.”
Rama’s eyes are brimming with tears, she looks like she’s about to explode. So am I.
“Did you ever think to look into the car crash that killed your parents?” Nadine goes on. “Or the DNRs that they signed for their insurance just before they died? I paid a great deal to have those documents falsified.”
DNR. Do not resurrect. Fury is boiling my blood. Nadine Zabelle didn’t just get me to hunt and deliver my own daughter to her. She killed Vera, and Vera’s husband, and then she raised my daughter herself in secret, preparing her to become the ruthless, deadly bounty hunter that she is today.
“I killed your parents, child!” Nadine gloats. “And now, I’m going to kill you while your father watches.” With that, Nadine produces an boxy black plasma pistol from within her voluminous shimmersilk robes.
The weapon swings into line with Rama’s chest. Nadine is grinning so broadly that it looks like it must hurt her face. She glances at me. “How does it feel to be so thoroughly outplayed, Mr. Korbin? I’m surprised you didn’t figure any of this out. Even your daughter’s name was a clue. Rama is short for Rhamnusia, which is the Greek goddess of retribution—in particular against those who succumb to hubris, like you.
“You think I don’t know where your hovertrucks went? That you have an army of bots just waiting to attack my fortress? Rama was working for me, and you told her all of your plans!”
I glance at Rama, my eyes hard. She glances back and angrily flicks away her tears. She was in on it, but she didn’t know Nadine Zabelle was after more than just me. She did know that I was her father, but what does that matter? I never raised her. She didn’t owe me anything. She owed Nadine Zabelle, who swooped in to save her from foster care after her parents died. Nadine took her in and gave her a life of privilege, if not the warmth and love she deserved.
Nadine allows us to wallow in a moment of silent misery, then goes on in a chillingly light-hearted voice: “As we speak, my men are getting ready to crack open the pod that you’re using to control Aurora. It’s over, Korbin. You lose. You’re about to lose everything, just like I did. But don’t think that I’m going to kill you. You’ll have to live with the agony of your loss—in a dungeon, of course, but you will live. I’ll make sure of it.”
It’s my turn for a fucking revelation.
“Wrong,” I say.
“Excuse me?” Nadine asks, cocking one dark eyebrow at me.
“You won’t be making sure of anything, because you’ll be dead.”
Nadine’s eyes widen in confusion and shock. But I don’t waste time gloating like she did.
I simply trigger the plasma grenades that I hid inside of Rama’s torso. She turns into a blinding fireball that blows out the windows behind us and incinerates everything and everyone within a hundred feet.
Chapter 55
Within seconds I’m waking up in the VR pod in the back of my rented hovertruck to see the scowling faces of actual humans. Two of them. Both have shaved heads, glowing ink, and scarred faces that may or may not conceal cybernetic implants. They’re armored and heavily armed with rifles, sidearms, grenades, and personal shields.
One is massive and dark-skinned, the other as pale as death itself. These are Nadine’s men, the ones she told me were standing by to wake me up. Behind them I can see an entire army of Nadine’s security bots standing amidst the spiky black razor trees where my bots parked the truck.
“Get out!” the black man says, grabbing me by the collar of my jacket and lifting me bodily from the pod. I hear servos and motors whirring in his suit as he does so, revealing that he’s not just wearing regular body armor, but an expensive exosuit like the one I left on Aquaria.
In the back of the truck are the two A-MAWs I assigned to guard me, both of them lying in severed pieces on the floor.
“You really fucked up, ombay,” the pale one says.
“Did I?” I ask.
“The boss is going to tear you apart.”
“You mean Nadine? I killed he
r.”
Black man sneers, drops me on the bed of the truck and gives me a shove toward the opening. I stumble out, half-falling, half-jumping to the ground.
The two armored goons follow me down from the back of the truck. The army of security bots tracks me with their rifles. Pale-face has a swagger that completes his gangster-trash aura.
“You must be a real scrigg,” he says, while scratching his jaw and grinning at me. His mouth is full of sharp, blue-white terantium teeth that must have cost him a fortune to put in. He could do some real damage with a bite. “Nobody dies anymore.”
I nod agreeably with that and back up a few steps to get closer to the security bots. “I guess you’re about to find out,” I say.
And then I trigger the plasma grenades in my torso, and a raging fireball tears through me for the second time in as many minutes.
I’m waking up a split second later in the VR pod on the Seraph, where I’ve been controlling the spec ops bot that I used for my decoy in the back of the truck. The cover of the pod groans as it opens up, and I sit up, feeling disoriented after having died twice in a row. Otherwise, I’m fine.
Rama is already out of her pod, watching me with blue eyes that are shining with a hint of real tears.
It hurt her to hear Nadine’s real plot. When she woke up in that pod, she probably thought for a moment that she was actually dead.
“You switched us when I was asleep in the neuroscanner,” she says as I scramble out of my pod.
Just because I outplayed Nadine, doesn’t mean it’s safe for us to delay in here. Speaking of, it’s time to call in the cavalry. I snap off a command to the army of A-MAWs I have waiting nearby. Delta One confirms. Nadine thinks she knows where they are, and maybe she does, but she was planning to have them outgunned by the time they arrived, and that won’t be the case anymore.
I nod in lieu of a reply as I run for the doors of the ROC. Rama is right on my heels as I go screaming down the corridor, heading for the ramp to the cockpit.
She goes on, her tone accusing, “You put me in that pod and I woke up controlling a bot, thinking that I was in my real body.”
“I saved your life,” I say.
“But you knew,” Rama insists angrily as we fly up the ramp. “You knew everything the whole time. Did you know that she was going to kill me? Or that she killed my parents?”
“Not the whole time, and not everything. I learned that you were secretly working for Mohinari, but not that he’d raised you or that he’d killed your parents, and I didn’t know that he was actually Nadine Zabelle, or that she was planning to kill you. But I had an inkling about that.”
We enter the cockpit together, and I drop into the pilot’s seat. Rama takes the co-pilot’s.
I bring the shields and weapons online, and lift off in a hurry.
Zabelle’s fleet is still sitting outside on the landing pad, but the fortress is gushing fire from every window and door, and the subtle blue haze of its shields is gone. Those grenades took the shields down from the inside, just as I suspected they would.
“Target those ships before any of them take off. I’ll get the guns on the roof.”
Rama takes control of the weapon systems as I hover up, targeting Nadine’s rooftop defenses with the Seraph’s laser cannons.
Rama fires a pair of missiles at the ships on the landing pads. The turrets on the roof intercept with lasers almost instantly, but we’re at point-blank range, so it’s not fast enough.
Both missiles explode, just a dozen feet from their targets. The two Type-9 corvettes at the back of the landing pads erupt in booming fireballs. The wall of the fortress behind them crumbles, and part of the roof collapses in jagged, flaming chunks.
And then our rail guns boom with steady reports as Rama fires them at the smaller fighters and interceptors.
The laser turrets on the roof redirect their fire to us just as I stomp on the left rudder pedal, activating the lateral thrusters to send the Seraph skidding around the fortress in a strafing pattern. The enemy turrets hit us with thick red laser beams that hiss and roar against our shields.
But they’re all point defenses, designed to take out missiles and small fighters, not larger ships like this one.
I fire back with the Seraph’s heavy lasers, sending emerald fire raining all over the roof, while Rama uses the rail guns on security bots that are just now turning their pathetically underpowered handheld weapons on us. Turret after turret explodes in a hail of fiery debris as the Seraph’s heavy lasers strike their targets. We’re shielded, and they’re not, so it’s no contest.
Within seconds, we’ve neutralized the fortress defenses, but I’m almost positive Nadine has reinforcements inbound, either from orbit or neighboring cities. This is still a race against the clock.
Dropping the Seraph in front of the fortress, I hover there and trigger a blast from the laser cannons to make a hole. Bright green lasers snap out and the doors blow open in a molten rain of shrapnel.
“Let’s go!” I say, landing hard in front of the doors with a ground-shaking thud.
“Where are we going? We should be getting out of here!”
“Permadeath, remember? We have to track down Nadine’s scan data and figure out where she is now.”
I run for the cargo bay and what’s left of the weapons I bought on Hades.
“You’re out of your mind!” Rama cries as she races after me.
I decide not to mention to her that I’m also planning to rescue Omar and his family—assuming they’re here—and then get us all out of here on the Hammer. It’s only a matter of time before a resurrected, synthetic version of Nadine comes flying down here with a fleet of reinforcements and turns this entire cliffside into a smoking crater.
No problem. Should be easy.
Chapter 56
Rama and I put on armored vests with integrated energy shields and take the heaviest weapons we can find. It’s a mad rush to arm ourselves, and there is no time to think twice about what we might need. She grabs an automatic bolter rifle as her primary and two EMP pistols, one on each hip, to deal with bots, then starts clipping grenades to her belt as fast as she can.
I strap on a bandoleer of seeker drones, and a massive rifle that fires guided explosive rounds for my primary. My secondary is an EMP cannon that clips over my forearm, as well as a plasma pistol with three stun darts. Finally, I stuff spare rounds for the rifle in pouches on my vest, and clip three plasma grenades and two flash grenades to my belt. Almost as an afterthought, I grab a plasma blade and clip it between the grenades.
“That’s it! On me!”
We sprint together for the airlock. I override it to skip the decontamination sequence, and both sets of doors part before we even reach them. We race down the landing ramp, and my holoband is already tagging targets. Two bots, right inside the entrance. Fires are still blazing in there, but they don’t seem to notice.
The first one opens fire with a high-powered laser that flashes brightly against my shield.
Rama shoots back with the bolter rifle. Armor-piercing rounds crunch through the bot’s torso, staggering it. The second bot directs its fire on Rama.
I target both of them with explosive rounds and pull the trigger twice. The rifle thumps hard against my shoulder.
And both bots explode in a fiery rain of shrapnel.
“Looks like I picked the wrong gun,” Rama says.
But my rifle only holds six rounds per clip. Hers is less devastating, but she’ll still be firing long after I’m out of ammo.
Rama and I run to the shattered entrance of the fortress, each of us taking cover beside the doors before scouting the approach with our sights. Remote-connections to the weapon sights feed imagery straight to our holobands no matter where we’re actually looking.
The inside looks clear, and my holoband’s sensors confirm, but there is no telling how many enemies could be lurking on the lower levels.
A quick look at the minimap in the top left of my display
reveals my reinforcements racing up behind us in their hovertrucks.
The trucks stop right behind us and twenty A-MAWs come boiling out. Bravo Team is here.
“Reporting for duty, sir,” Bravo Leader says as he and nineteen identical robots come clanking toward our position.
“Secure the entrances!” I say aloud.
Four bots run through the main entrance, their padded metal feet grinding debris into the stone floors.
I hear gunfire plinking off their armor and see three enemy bots via the remote connection to my rifle’s sights. They’re on the second-floor balcony shooting down with kinetic rifles.
Deciding to save my ammo, I let the A-MAWs take care of it.
EMP grenades fly down from the balcony even as my bots unleash their EMP cannons on the attackers.
“Cover!” I cry, ducking back from the entrance. The resultant explosions from those grenades still take out my gear for a few seconds, but all four of my bots remain standing. Their EMP shielding did the job. I just hope it continues to hold.
“Entryway is clear,” Bravo One declares.
I wait for my holoband to complete its reboot sequence. When it stops flickering, I step through with Rama, checking the inside corners just to be sure that we’re clear.
We are.
“On me, Bravos.” I run down the fire-blasted hallway to the main living area. Before emerging from the hall, I stop and gesture for the bots to go ahead of me and clear the room. They go clanking out, guns sweeping.
“Clear!” Bravo Leader says.
Rama and I leave the cover of the hall. The living area is utterly scorched. Here and there, flames are still licking off the furniture. The windows are all gone. Even the pool is charred black and filled with bits of debris. More of my bots come streaming in through the shattered windows, having scanned and cleared the perimeter. Out on that landing pad suspended above the cliff, the Hammer still looks fine, if a little blackened. It’s thirty feet away, so it would have been spared from most of the blast.
What’s left of the Zabelle family is scattered around the room, but I need to be sure, so I run to the crater in the floor, where I was standing when the grenades went off.
The Bounty Hunter (Cade Korbin Chronicles Book 1) Page 26