What the hell had we gotten ourselves into?
Our phalanx was soon marching toward a nearby cluster of warehouses and split into two groups. Luckily, Kovac’s line and my line stayed together. The troopers all held their crossbows at the ready, scanning the area for threats. Stacks of empty crates leaned against warehouse walls and discarded plasticloth storage bags lay in random piles beside the crates. UFS Peacekeepers or citizens could be behind any one of these, waiting to open fire on us. I really hoped they didn’t.
We passed between several sets of warehouses until they made way for the slightly taller housing units and streets that were lined with trash instead of crates. These squat buildings were a lighter shade of gray than the warehouses, which I think was supposed to make them look more comfortable to the dock workers and other minimum-wage workers who lived inside, but all it did was show more of the dirt and oil that covered the area.
The sad-looking buildings were covered in windows—most of them cracked and broken—which gave at least a little light to the tiny rooms on the inside. Something moved in one of the windows a few stories from the ground and a trooper ahead of me fired a barrage of arrows that exploded upon impact, tearing a large hole in the building’s thin walls.
Several voices screamed and a woman’s body fell out of the building and landed on the ground with a sickening thud.
The heroic, brassy-sounding music was already building in my mind as I began raising a clenched fist to blast these bastards.
Something nudged my arm down, and I snapped my head to the side. Kovac had reached over with his vibro-hammer and was gently pressing down on my softly-glowing armored glove.
Kovac shook his head and I grudgingly silenced the music in my mind. He was right. It made me sick, but he was right. We couldn’t afford to lose our cover—not now.
After our group had marched past several more blocks of the run-down housing units, the buildings became taller and a little cleaner. Less garbage on the street signaled that we’d reached outskirts of the commercial district, which meant we were getting closer to Cosmart—best deals in the solar system—and our rendezvous point with Rand and Lopez.
It had been several minutes since the woman had fallen to her death, and there was still no sign of any resistance. Where were the Peacekeeper forces on Pluto? Had they already been wiped out?
No sooner had I thought this than our group came to a stop. I almost ran into the trooper ahead of me, and was now just standing awkwardly close to him. I took a quick step backward and leaned over to see what had happened.
The road was blocked by an overturned public transit vehicle—one used to carry workers from the dense housing units into town to work their minimum-wage jobs. I had expected to see scars on the vehicle from a firefight, but it was clean. Well, it was actually really dirty, but it didn’t have any scarring from plasma fire or whatever powered the Dominion’s weapons.
There was just enough space between the downed transit vehicle and the tall commercial building’s wall for the troopers to squeeze through, single-file. I saw a trooper cautiously slide through the gap with his crossbow raised and jerkily followed his line of sight for threats.
Apparently, he didn’t see anything, because he lowered his crossbow. Just as he was turning to wave us through the gap, though, a large plasma slug nailed him in the chest and knocked his lifeless body against the nearby wall.
And then, all hell broke loose.
21
PLASMA SLUGS WERE zipping toward me and the other Dominion troopers from almost every direction. I looked around for cover, but couldn’t find any. I began to hear a faint, but triumphant song at the back of my mind and before I knew it, my arm shield was glowing purple. I dropped to one knee, thrust forward the shield, and felt my arm buzz as several plasma slugs ricochet off it.
Now that I had at least a little breathing room, I looked up at the overturned transit vehicle and saw Peacekeeper soldiers in blue fatigues wearing reinforced metal cloth flack jackets and helmets with cams mounted to the side.
They weren’t the only ones firing plasma weapons. I looked around and saw Peacekeepers standing in the building entry ways just past the transit vehicle and others crouching behind shattered second-story windows. All of them were firing at the Dominion troopers, which meant that they were also firing at Kovac and me.
I turned and saw my over-sized crewmate huddling against the trooper in front of him for at least some protection from the hail of plasma. The other trooper kept trying to push Kovac away, but the giant couldn’t be moved when he wanted to stay put. And as long as Kovac couldn’t get his shield to work, he was going to stay as close as possible to someone who could.
Another plasma blast bounced off my shield and brought me back to my terrible situation. This was another one of those “stuck between a six-headed monster and a giant whirlpool” situations. Kovac and I had to fight to stay alive, but without harming—or, at least, without killing—the soldiers who were trying their damnedest to kill us. Every few seconds, I raised my crossbow and fired off an arrow. Each shot was high and wide, and I hoped none of the troopers would notice that I never hit anywhere close to a Peacekeeper.
The troopers around me were definitely outnumbered, but with their arm shields, they were able to deflect most of the plasma fire and it ended up being a pretty even fight.
Until the Peacekeepers brought in a plasma canon.
The shot came from somewhere along the second story and was aimed at the center of our group. There was a flash of blue light, a loud explosion, and then bodies and chunks of pavement went flying. Dust and smoke filled the air. I’d been knocked onto my back, but I was still conscious.
I rolled over, coughed, and looked for Kovac. I could see his giant form through the hazy air just a couple of meters away, so I grabbed my crossbow and quickly crawled over and nudged him.
No response.
“Come on, big guy,” I said, hoping the short-range comm unit in our suits hadn’t been damaged.
I shook his harm, then banged on his helmet. Suddenly, he sat up and, at the same time, swung his inactivated vibro-hammer at me. I somersaulted out of the way.
“Kovac, you idiot—it’s me!”
He shook his head to clear the cobwebs, then answered. “Walker—what happened?”
“Plasma cannon.” Then, seeing the shapes of other Dominion troopers starting to move through the smoke, I said, “We’ve got to get out of here.”
We were already at the rear of the group, so we stumbled back toward the direction we’d come from until we found an alleyway between two commercial buildings. When we reached the other end, we came upon yet another firefight between Peacekeeper soldiers and Dominion troopers just up the road.
“Great,” I said. “They’ve set up a perimeter.”
I looked up and saw a walkway several stories up that connected two of the buildings.
“Follow me,” I said, and ran along the street side of the building farthest from the fight until I found an entrance. It was locked, so I stepped back, fired a glowing arrow into its access panel, kicked in the door, and practically fell inside. Kovac tumbled in after me.
It took a second for our Egghead helmets to adjust. At first, everything was dark, but then there was a quick flash and my surroundings appeared in the sort of faded reddish-brown color people use when they’re trying to make an image of two unfortunate children forced to hold hands look “vintage.”
When the room came into focus, I saw that we were in some sort of mass-market home goods store.
“Aw, hell,” I said.
It was the store—you know, the one that’s basically a maze that takes four hours to find your way out of. And that’s only if you’re shopping alone.
“We’re doomed,” I said.
I looked over at Kovac, who was pulling a hidden footrest out from under a couch.
“Wow—that’s convenient,” he said.
“Yeah, I’ll be sure to get you one when t
he store opens in the morning. But now,” I said, looking around, “we need to find a way up.”
There was an elevator in the corner, so we got inside and I kept pressing the “close door” button as quickly as I could until they finally shut. I scanned the list of floors until I found one that said “Skywalk” between the twelfth and fourteenth floors. I grinned, and in a matter of seconds, the elevator dinged and we stepped out.
We faced a sea of desks, lit with a depressingly pale light and separated by short partitions. The desks appeared to be empty at first, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw a brown-haired head rise slowly from behind a partition before shooting back down. Damn—there were probably dozens of civilians hiding beneath their desks and scared to death. These poor folks must have been working when the fighting began and were now trapped in here. If they ever made it out of here alive, I bet they’d memorize all of their emergency evacuation procedures backward and forward. But now, all they could do was huddle under their tiny desks and wait for the shooting to stop.
I took a hesitant step forward, then another, then a few more. Nobody else dared expose themselves. I motioned Kovac forward and he caught up with me as I snuck through the center aisle of this eerily quiet place.
I kept looking around, waiting for someone who had suddenly decided to be a hero and attack the two invaders with desk lamps and staplers, but nothing happened.
Part of me was relieved we didn’t have to defend ourselves against these poor civilians. But another part of me was disappointed they didn’t fight back. I guess if I had been in their places, I’d be scared too. Hell, I was scared now, but a dying man I’d looked up to for most of my life had told me I needed to be a hero, so here I was—marching around like an idiot in enemy armor.
No—I couldn’t afford to think like that. My team needed me. And I sure as hell needed them if I was going to make it out of this alive. So I put my head down and picked up my pace.
In just a few minutes, we reached the Skywalk, which was a glass-walled walkway that connected many of the buildings downtown. When we were halfway across, I looked down at the street and saw bright blasts of pale blue and bright red. That was enough to get us jogging.
When we reached the center of the next building, there was a small lobby where another path cut across ours. Signs pointed to different major areas of the city, so we followed the indicator that sent us toward the capitol building. We cut through another three or four buildings and passed several wide fields of desks. Occasionally a head would pop up to see what the noise was, but they would disappear just as quickly.
The next time we reached a lobby with an intersection, I stopped.
“What’s the matter?” Kovac asked.
“I need to see how close we are to the capitol. This way.”
We walked out onto another Skywalk and looked around. The blue and red light show was now far behind us. And in front of us, the capitol building with its white walls and silver domed roof rose several klicks into the air.
“Cosmart’s just over there,” I said, pointing to a sprawling building below us.
We passed through yet another expanse of deserted desks and finally reached the elevator. But before we went down, I had to do something.
I fired a glowing arrow into the ceiling, which exploded upon impact and sent sparks flying. “People of Pluto,” I yelled in my deepest voice. “We are the Dominion! We will blast you to bits and destroy your pathetic planetoid—unless you band together and fight for your freedom!”
A handful of heads rose, and I began to smile. Maybe this was just what they needed to rise up and become heroes themselves!
That’s when I realized I was still wearing the enemy’s armor and would likely be on the receiving end of a poorly planned—and therefore incredibly dangerous—act of resistance, so I quickly called the elevator and pulled Kovac inside after me before anyone got too heroic.
Soon we were back at ground level and making our way through a disturbingly white and tidy personal data pad store. Luckily, the hoard of annoying customer service employees was either off duty or taking cover somewhere in a back room, so at least we were safe from their commission-hungry race to assault us as we ran through the empty store, sliding across the freakishly glossy floor.
When we exited the building, I could see Cosmart only a few dozen meters ahead. But there was also a large group of Dominion soldiers marching directly in front of it.
“We can’t use the main entrance,” I whispered to Kovac. “Too much exposure. We’ll need to go around back.”
So I took us along a few deserted alleyways, sprinted across a major street, and got us onto a pathway that led behind the building. We weaved our way between dumpsters and cargo pods until we were within spitting distance—in normal gravity, that is—from the loading dock.
We ducked behind a battered cargo pod and I peeked my head out. I didn’t see any Dominion troopers—or anyone else, for that matter.
“Okay,” I said quietly to Kovac. “We make a run for the loading dock on three. One . . . two . . .”
But before we could make our move, we heard a loud metallic clunk and the world around us flared into a bright white.
22
I RAISED A hand to my face, and as my eyes struggled to adjust to the light, I heard the unmistakable clicking sound of plasma weapons loading from behind us. A booming voice yelled, “Stop! Hands up or we shoot!”
At this point, we didn’t really have an option, so up went our hands.
“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t blow your pathetic insides all over these walls,” the voice said from behind me. But by now, I recognized it.
“Because,” I said. “If you made a mess of us, some poor maintenance worker would have to clean it up.”
I turned around slowly with my hands still raised to give Lopez a dazzling grin. She was in her faded gray fatigues now, only a few meters away and aiming a plasma rifle with both hands at my head. Rand was also in his own light blue fatigues just behind her with a plasma pistol in one hand and a small device in the other, right next to the plasma pistol’s hammer.
“Hey, easy there—it’s just me,” I said as I took a step forward.
She moved her rifle a fraction of a centimeter to the left and fired a plasma slug past my head.
“I said stop!” Lopez yelled.
Why didn’t she recognize my voice? Then I remembered—I was still wearing both a face mask and a Dominion trooper’s helmet, and she had no way of actually hearing me. So I slowly brought my raised hands to the side of my helmet and lifted it up, revealing my face mask.
“Jesus!” Lopez said, lowering her rifle.
“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far, Lopez. Just Walker. Though I appreciate the compliment.” I dropped my helmet and pulled back my face mask. Kovac did the same.
“Why the hell are you still wearing your suits under that armor?” Lopez growled.
“We had to put them on when we were still outside, okay?” I said.
Then, looking around for the sources of the several plasma weapon noises I’d heard, I said, “Who else is with you?”
“We arrived by ourselves,” Rand said.
I narrowed my eyes. “What about all the weapons we heard loading?”
Rand grinned, which looked especially funny under his mustache. “I happened to have a box of useless micro-spotlights in my damn crate of stupid equipment and affixed them to mundane objects nearby, in case anyone attempted to confront us here.”
“Oh,” I said awkwardly.
“Come on,” Lopez said with a scowl. “Let’s get inside before a couple of competent Dominion soldiers show up.”
Our crew hurried onto the loading dock and entered the warehouse-sized storage area at the back of the store. Lopez and Rand walked to a corner of the room and stepped behind a semicircle of shrink-wrapped palettes stacked high with Moonberry Delight powdered drink mix.
Behind the barrier, two long crates sat parallel on the floor. Rand
lifted his duffel bag off the top of one and set it down next to his rolling crate before sitting down. Lopez winced as she lowered herself onto the other crate, picked up a mini data pad with a sparkling light pink case.
I snorted and Lopez looked up. “Shut up, Walker—it’s all they had in here. If you want me to keep us alive, you’ll keep your nose noises to yourself.”
Next to her was a stack of magazines—only Lopez could manage to find a hard copy of her favorite source for trashy celebrity gossip when on the run from an evil army—and a pile of snacks in shiny wrappers. I hurried over, salivating, and reached out to take one, but Lopez paused her tapping and quickly slapped my hand away, never taking her eyes away from the sparkly data pad.
“Get your own food,” Lopez said, still looking down.
Then she glanced over at my waist. “And change out of that armor. It’s embarrassing.”
I quickly became very aware of my shiny—snug—crotch piece. Kovac and I hurriedly stripped off our borrowed armor and stepped out of our suits. It was a lot cooler, now that I was wearing my usual fatigues. Since the suit’s gloves weren’t very bulky, I kept them on so I could keep my stones handy. Just in case. Finally, I slung my sheathed rod-sword over my shoulder and fastened the buckle around my chest before stepping back to my crew.
Rand was now rifling through the contents of his rolling crate and Lopez was still furiously working on her ridiculous mini data pad—only now she was resting it on her lap while she absently opened a small snack package with one hand.
“Hey, where’d you get the food?” I asked.
Rand looked up from his rifling. “I would argue that has no right to be classified as ‘food.’ It’s a death warrant.”
I looked at the dull red puffy cake Lopez was absently nibbling on as she read and my mouth started watering.
“I just need to get something in me,” I said. “Anything.”
“Suit yourself,” Rand said. “There are several palettes over there with something that should meet your basic culinary needs.”
Rebel Sword Page 12
