Rampant Destruction (CERBERUS Book 10)

by Andy Peloquin

  But Nolan had weapons of his own. None that could directly impact this particular firefight, but powerful enough that they gave him serious leverage against Raptor.

  “Do that,” Nolan said, “and that virus currently running rampant in your system will grow some nasty fangs and start shredding instead of just encrypting.”

  He didn’t know precisely what manner of virus Taia had unleashed, but she had made it clear that the Protection Bureau’s data wouldn’t be lost, only locked away and inaccessible to anyone except her.

  “And what would you have in exchange?” Raptor asked in an aristocrat’s laconic drawl. “I take it this isn’t about money.”

  “This is what it’s always been about,” Nolan snapped. “Freedom. Mine and Jared’s. The chance to walk away, like any operator in my situation should be given.”

  “Any operator in your situation.” Raptor repeated the words, now sounding like a backwater Moabite. “I see your stay in the Vault opened your eyes to the true extent of the value you provide to the Empire.”

  “As your lab rat!” Nolan fought to control his temper—anger wouldn’t serve him in this negotiation. “Whatever you fuckers gave me and Warbeast Team, we’re done being your experiments to be poked and prodded. We’re walking away. All of us. Away from the Protection Bureau. Away from the arrangement that I had with Agent Styver. Away from all of your tests. You have dozens more subjects. Run your tests on them and let us live our lives.”

  “Even with your brother’s life hanging in the balance?” Raptor asked. “He—“

  “Was given a reduced sentence and a transfer to a minimum-security prison on Exodus VI.” Nolan had no desire to play this man’s game. Men like Agent Styver and Raptor—if he even was a man—tended to twist truth and mix it with lies, using words like weapons. “But after the evidence I found that your agency hired Shadowspear to frame Jared, it looks like we’re going to be renegotiating that particular deal.”

  “If you believe we’ll just let you run off with such a sophisticated piece of Imperial technology in your brain—“

  Nolan cut him off. “What I believe is that I have a goddamned lot of hard evidence proving that the Protection Bureau exists, and that it’s running a lot of shady shit inside the Empire.” His jaw muscles clenched. “I’ve got enough here to get every news outlet, pirate radio station, and dark holo-net site talking about you and the handful of agents working under you.”

  “Thereby implicating yourself in the process,” Raptor said. There was no stress in his voice—which currently sounded too damned much like Fineas Derring—only the unshakeable calm of someone confident in their negotiating position. “You’d end up right back in the Vault.”

  “Not if I walk away.” This was the moment that it came down to. Everything he’d done, the many pieces he’d worked so hard to put together, had all led him here. “Jared gets his pardon. His criminal record is erased, down to the tiniest data bit. Wiped away as if it had never existed. Me, I walk away to live a civilian’s life. No more Cerberus, no more missions, no more Project Icarus tests. I go back to being Nolan Garrett, wheelchair-bound retired Ironhand. The AI stays with me, and you fuckers never touch her.”

  “I take it you expect us to simply let your friends go as well?” Raptor’s tone was calm, but there was no mistaking the threat in his voice. Nolan knew the man wasn’t just talking about Jadis and Bex, who stood at his side in the tunnel. The bastard had to know about the rest of Warbeast Team, too. “After such rampant destruction, and so many crimes against the Empire? My agent is dead—”

  “Because you hire out shitty contractors,” Nolan snapped. It came as no surprise that Raptor knew about his agent’s fate—the Protection Bureau knew far too much about far too much. “It was your Black Crows who gunned him down.”

  “Hmph.” Raptor’s response sounded as if he hadn’t known this particular tidbit. “Still, it was your kidnapping of Agent Styver that got him killed.”

  “He died in the line of duty.” Nolan felt something cold and hard form in the pit of his stomach. It was the same spiel rattled off to all the mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, and spouses who had lost loved ones during the war with the Terran League. “Honestly, I don’t give a shit about whether Agent Styver was an invaluable asset, a run-of-the-mill desk jockey, or your goddamned fuck-buddy. He’s dead, your men killed him, and there’s nothing either of us can do to change that. But what we can change—what you can change—is what happens to all those trillions of exabytes of data—“

  “Yottabytes,” Taia corrected. “Trillions of yottabytes of data.”

  “—that you’ve collected,” Nolan finished. “You want it back, you know our terms. The choice is yours, Raptor.”

  Long seconds of silence passed. Despite his outward show of calm defiance, Nolan’s heart was galloping a furious beat. The adrenaline rush of battle coursed in his veins and set every muscle fiber in his body burning. Fear howled at him to move, to find a better vantage point to return fire when the order inevitably came to gun him down.

  But he couldn’t abandon his position. He couldn’t leave Bex, still sheltering Roz with her own body. He couldn’t let Jadis, who still knelt beside the hover-train ready to resume the fight, catch a bullet because she’d been too damned stubborn to walk away from him. Jared had endured so much over the past years; Nolan couldn’t let anything else happen to his brother.

  So he remained where he was, hands gripping his Balefire Mark 2.1 with a rock-steady hold, prepared to fight to the death.

  Then a familiar voice echoed over comms. “Someone call for backup?” Master Sergeant Kane growled. “Say the word, Cerberus, and we’ll light these fuckers up!”

  Without his command, Taia projected an image onto his HUD. The feed from the Scimitar’s front-facing digital optics showed the ship speeding over the rainforest, its guns trained directly on the force of Black Crows assembled on the no-longer-concealed landing pad.

  Then the feed split, and another video stream appeared. This one came from the Phantasm, once more fully operational and slowing to hover, invisible, above the landing pad.

  Both had entered the interference field—a few minutes too late to join in the battle, but to Nolan it felt that they’d arrived at precisely the right time.

  “Tell your men to look up,” Nolan said, once more on the comms channel with Raptor. “Your Mameluke isn’t going to get its guns elevated in time to take my ship down before it’s blown to shit. It won’t get a shot off at us, either, not with my team’s finger on the trigger. Your Black Crows will last about two seconds longer before they’re ripped to shreds by its guns.”

  He doubted that would do much to convince the man—Agent Styver had made it clear that the contractors were nothing more than assets, fully expendable—so he gave the knife a final twist.

  “You’ve lost, Raptor. You know that as well as I do. But if you make me gun down the rest of these fuckers, then you’ll never get your data back.” Nolan dropped his voice to a low, gravelly growl. “And after all of your data is gone, I’ll set my AI to destroying every shred of information that you could possibly use to try and come after me.”

  This time, when anger surged in Nolan’s chest, he didn’t push it back down. He leaned into the fury, used it to add fire to his words. “All that time, I’ll hunt you and every one of your agents down on every Imperial planet in every solar system, until you and I have a pleasant little face-to-face meeting that only one of us is walking away from. You saw what I did to Agent Styver in the space of a few hours. Imagine what I could do with days. Weeks. Months.”

  “You—“

  “I have the resources to do it,” Nolan drove on. “Agent Styver always paid well. I’ve got money enough to dedicate the rest of my life to tracking you and every Protection Bureau agent, asset, and hired gun. And you know my record. You know what I did in the war, what the Silverguard trained me to do. So the question, Raptor”—he spat the word as an insult—“is whether you want
to go to war with me, or if you’d rather save yourself and your Protection Bureau a lifetime’s worth of suffering and give me what I goddamn want!?”

  What he’d been promised in the first place, no less.

  Again, the silence stretched on for long seconds, until nearly a minute passed with no answer from Raptor. Yet Nolan could almost feel the presence on the other side of the comms call, feel the tension radiating across the unknown distance between him and this man who had become his enemy.

  He knew how much he was worth to the Protection Bureau. He’d pulled off jobs that by all rights should have been impossible, taken down targets no one else could. Taia was a masterpiece of technology that continued to exceed even her creators’ expectations. Doctor Sladek and Val had been stunned at his unique physiology, at the mixture of tungstenite and MCH that could very well be the key to unlocking their Project Icarus efforts.

  That was why the Protection Bureau had to let him walk away. That was the only way they had a chance of reeling him back in down the line, when they needed him for another big, impossible job that only he could pull off.

  When Raptor spoke again, his digitally modulated voice was calm. “Done,” he said, his coreworld accent distinctly Genesian. “You drive a hard bargain, Cerberus. Pray we don’t cross paths again. Ever. Or you won’t walk away so easily.”

  Nolan opened his mouth to respond, but a click signaled the end of the comms call. A second later, a Black Crow’s voice echoed from the tank’s loudspeaker. “Move out! Back to the transport.”

  For a moment, the contractors at the mouth of the tunnel refused to move. Their rifles remained firmly trained on Nolan, fingers still on their triggers. Nolan knew exactly how they felt—they’d just watched their comrades, perhaps even some friends, gunned down in battle. And now their commander expected them to simply walk away and leave the enemy alive?

  Nolan could see their thoughts written plain on their blood-spattered faces, the fury in the hate-filled glares they shot at him. He tightened his grip on his Balefire Mark 2.1, ready to evade and return fire if they decided to take one last shot at him.

  Their discipline held. Slowly, they lowered their weapons and, with one collective, venomous glare directed at him, turned to march off the landing pad, hauling their wounded and dead with them as they followed the Mameluke into the jungle.

  And just like that, the battle was over. They were free.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Nolan paused just long enough to salute the Scimitar, which remained hovering above the landing pad. Trusting that Master Sergeant Kane would keep an eye on the departing Black Crows—with help from Taia in the Phantasm—Nolan raced back the way he’d come minutes earlier.

  He reached the hover-train just as Bex rose from behind cover. At Nolan’s mental command, Taia had looped her and the rest of Warbeast Team into his conversation with Raptor. She’d heard everything.

  “Fuuuuuuuck!” She exhaled the word in a long breath. “That’s really it? It’s done?”

  Nolan could only shrug. “For now. They’ll come crawling back in a few months, maybe a year or two. But right now, they’ll let me go. You, too. Everyone. We’re free.”

  Bex lowered her rifle, her shoulders drooping from exhaustion. “Damn.” Another long exhale. “I...” She seemed at a loss for words. Instead of speaking, she removed her helmet and ran a hand through her sweat-soaked hair. “So what are you going to do?” she finally asked, not meeting his eyes.

  Nolan swallowed the lump rising in his throat. He knew exactly what that question meant—a part of him had wondered the same thing since he saw her again. But he couldn’t think about that, not yet. Not until he figured out how to help his brother.

  So, instead of saying what he wanted to say—what he suspected she wanted from him—he just said, “It’s time you think about what you’re going to do.” He thrust his chin toward Roz.

  Bex looked down to where her daughter huddled for cover behind the hover-train car, knees pulled up to her chest, face buried in her knees. She returned her gaze to Nolan, her eyes searching, but after a moment, she gave him a little nod of understanding and turned away. Kneeling, Bex gently pried Roz’s hands away. The little girl’s head snapped up and her eyes locked onto her mother’s face.

  “It’s over, baby,” Bex said. “The bad men are gone.”

  Roz gave a whimpering sob and threw her arms around her mother’s neck, pressing her face into Bex’s shoulder. Bex dropped her rifle and scooped up her daughter in both arms. She sat there, in the shadows of the tunnel, cradling the little girl like an infant, rocking her back and forth as she whispered soothing words.

  Nolan smiled. It was a good sight. Bex deserved all the happiness in the world. He wished he could be part of that happiness and that world, but not until he was absolutely certain Raptor would keep his word.

  “Nolan,” Jadis said over comms, “Jared’s waking up!”

  All thoughts of Bex and Roz faded from his mind as he heard his brother’s weak coughing, accompanied by a groan and a single harsh, whispered word. “No…lan?”

  “Jared!” Nolan slung the Balefire onto his magnetic back holster and raced to his brother’s side.

  Jadis was already there, kneeling next to Jared and checking him over. “No wounds,” she said. “And he looks…better.” She didn’t sound convinced.

  In the beam of Jadis’ helmet light, Nolan could see the extreme pallor of Jared’s skin, the look of confusion and fear on his face, the hints of yellow coloring the whites of his eyes. Jared labored for every gasping breath, and his hands pressed against his chest, as if he struggled to push air into his lungs.

  “Jared.” Nolan gripped his brother’s hand. “Jared, can you hear me? Talk to me!”

  Jared’s gaze darted toward him, but no recognition shone in his wide eyes.

  Nolan tore at his helmet until he finally managed to pull it free. Dropping it to the ground at his brother’s side, he grabbed Jared by the shoulders and shook him gently.

  “Jared, it’s Nolan. Do you recognize me?”

  That elicited a reaction. Jared’s eyes swam into focus, locking onto Nolan’s face and sweat-soaked hair. His eyes widened, but with recognition rather than confusion. “Nolan!” He reached up and grabbed Nolan’s forearms. “Y-you came back.”

  “Of course I came back.” Nolan gripped his brother’s shoulders tighter. “I couldn’t leave you, brother. Not again.” He pulled Jared close into a hug—it felt so strange, embracing a man he hadn’t seen in the better part of seven years, yet after all they’d both endured, he wanted nothing more. This was Jared, the kid brother he’d fought his entire life to protect. “I’ve never stopped trying to get you out!”

  “I know!” Jared said, his voice faint, his arms too weak to return Nolan’s embrace. “I always knew you’d come for me.”

  Tears burned behind Nolan’s eyes as he pulled back from the hug.

  “L-Lina.” Jared struggled to form the words through his shortness of breath and the pain shining in his eyes. “She’s…gone?”

  “Yes, she is.” Nolan had to swallow hard to keep from crying. “I’m sorry, Jared.” His voice turned raspy, hoarse. “I didn’t know she was—“

  “So she didn’t find you?” Jared’s voice rose in intensity, fire suddenly blazing in his eyes. “She didn’t…tell you?”

  Nolan hated seeing his brother like this. So weak, so confused. Did Jared truly not remember that they’d had this exact conversation a couple of days earlier?

  Fuck! Nolan inwardly cursed. What the hell have they done to you, Jared? The Project Icarus experiments, his time in the Reformation tank, and the cocktail of drugs they’d given him could have inflicted far more neurological and physiological damage than was visible on the surface.

  “Taia,” he said mentally, “I need to know what your tests found. I need to know if he’s—“

  Jared’s voice cut him off. “It’s not too late, though!” The fires in his eyes blazed brighter,
shining with a fierce determination. “You can still…stop it!”

  Nolan’s brow furrowed. “Stop what?”

  But Jared seemed not to hear him. He tightened his grip on Nolan’s arms and pulled him closer. “Listen to me!” he rasped around labored breaths. “After my discharge, I was approached by a man. Bennett.”

  Ice slithered down Nolan’s spine. That name—it belonged to the man who had delivered the burn order and everything that Warden Smythe had needed to incapacitate and imprison Nolan in the Vault.

  Jared was still talking. “Bennett wanted me to work for him. Some courier detail. Something that had me meeting with all sorts of people right here on Exodus VI.” Shadows filled his eyes. “Bad people, Nolan. Criminals.”

  Nolan sucked in a breath. Detective Locke had mentioned video footage of Jared meeting with the leaders of the Five Hand Syndicate. Nolan had believed it was forged, digitally altered the way Ex-Umbra had falsified the footage of Bex breaking into the IAF armory outside Phobury. But was it actually legitimate? If so, this Bennett might have been setting Jared up long before he was ever arrested.

  “But one day,” Jared continued, his voice dropping to a raspy whisper, “I was waiting to pick up a package from him and I overheard him talking on comms with someone. Mentioned something about Project Icarus. Said it was going too slowly, that ‘he’—he called that someone Machinist—needed to hurry up. That the deadline was coming soon.”

  “What deadline?” Nolan’s mind raced. “For what?”

  “I…I think I knew, before. I can’t remember what, though!” Jared shook his head weakly. “But hearing him talk about Project Icarus reminded me of that doctor I helped rescue on Proxima Centauri B.”

  “Doctor Sladek?” Nolan asked.

  “Yeah.” Confusion twisted Jared’s face. “How did you—“