Absolution: A Near Future Thriller (Forsaken Mercenary Book 2)

by Jonathan Yanez

  Monica took the wheel as we headed away from the safe house to the building where her father was being held. The cold in the air was enough to be able to see your breath by. I ran the plan through my mind over and over again as we traveled in silence. I sat in the row of seats behind Monica and Commander Shaw.

  Eric sat next to me with Charles in the back seat. The time of night meant there was little to no traffic on the wide Martian roads. We passed a total of three other vehicles on our way. It was three o’clock in the morning.

  The only people that should be out at this time of night were those working night shifts or up to no good. I should know. I was a member of the second group.

  We arrived across the street from the building I saw in Echo’s memory. The one story structure looked as unassuming as a privately owned caf shop. Anyone walking by would have no idea the nefarious goings on that occurred inside.

  “We hit it and we hit it hard,” Eric said, unzipping a black duffle bag by his feet. “Give me five seconds lead time then come in running. We should have breached the door right as you arrive. Hit it hard and it’ll fall.”

  “I’ll go in first,” I said to the commander. “For multiple reasons, I should go in first.”

  Commander Shaw turned to me with a stiff nod. He pulled the mask gathered at his brow down over his face.

  Eric, Charles, and I did the same.

  Monica had a mask in case she needed to get out of the vehicle. Right now, there was no point in having her wear it. The van’s tinted windows would be cover enough.

  “I’ll keep the vehicle running,” Monica said. “Are you all on the same channel?”

  A series of affirmatives answered her.

  “I’ll let you know if there’s the slightest whisper on the Galactic Government channel,” Monica said, going over the plan.

  “If we don’t see you in this world, we’ll see you in the next,” Eric said, maneuvering to a hunched position right next to the sliding door to the van. “Charles, ready?”

  The large man had already pulled his own mask over his face. He shrugged in his chest armor then checked the rifle he carried. It held a long suppressor at the end of the barrel.

  Charles looked like something out of a nightmare. I wouldn’t want to go up against the hulking figure without a face. He nodded to his brother.

  “Two, one, go,” Eric said as calm and cool as ever. With a single smooth move, he opened the van door. In his free hand, he carried the duffle of explosives and sprinted across the street and through the alley.

  Charles was a half step behind. The van actually lifted an inch or two as the massive man stepped out and followed his older but smaller brother.

  The cold air hit my masked face as I counted to five in my head.

  One, two.

  Eric and his brother crossed the street and reached the alley.

  Three, four.

  They were lost to sight a moment later. My heart drummed in my ears. My breathing became quick and excited as adrenaline was unleashed.

  Five.

  I jumped out of the vehicle, closing the door behind me. I heard more than saw Commander Shaw do the same.

  I was across the street and in the alley in a matter of seconds. I pulled the MK II from the holster at my back. The weapon didn’t have my fancy drum. My traditional tungsten rounds would have to do tonight.

  I saw Eric working on placing the explosives on the door. Charles assumed a protective stance, covering his brother while he worked.

  A moment later, Eric maneuvered to a position on the side of the door. Charles did the same. Eric hit a detonator in his hand.

  The explosion was short-lived and violent as the explosives detonated around the perimeter of the door like a string of well-placed dominos. The steel door smoked and sparked but didn’t fall in.

  I struck the door at a dead sprint. My right shoulder took the bulk of the blow as both the door and I fell inward. The hall was just like I had seen in Echo’s memory. A pair of Immortal Corp guards were coughing, trying to reorient themselves to what was going on.

  When they saw me crash through the door, they lifted their weapons in my direction.

  Two pulls of my trigger later, they were down and neutralized as I regained my feet.

  Another pair of guards came from a hall on the left.

  Commander Shaw was on my right as we took down the pair with a handful of precision shots. Commander Shaw carried a short-barreled rifle that sounded like a deep thunk every time he pulled the trigger.

  I took the lead, maneuvering over the bodies as I hurried for the door that would lead to the laboratory. I descended the steep flight of steps, taking them two at a time. Speed was the key here, so instead of trying the lock, I just kicked the door in, ready for a fight.

  Apparently, our surprise edge was over. A slew of rounds greeted me from four guards on the opposite side of the room. Glass shattered at a dozen different points of contact. I took a round to my chest plate and then my left thigh.

  I grunted in pain, going down to a knee. I squeezed my trigger, taking one of the guards in his head and another with a pair of rounds to his chest.

  Commander Shaw walked past me with his eye down the sights of his weapon. The man was fearless as he waded into the room under the onslaught of red laser rounds.

  His weapon thunked out laser rounds at a dizzying rate as he took out the first guard then the second. Somehow he remained unscathed.

  I wanted to ask him if he had a death wish, but I think I might have answered that question for myself already. The commander didn’t seem too enthused about going back into hypersleep. Maybe he was done being put under and brought back. Maybe his ticket out of it all was going down in the fight.

  There was no time to debate the state of the commander’s suicidal tendencies. He walked across the room, making sure the hostiles were done before coming back to me.

  “You going to make it?” he asked, looking down at my bleeding leg.

  “I’ll live,” I said, grimacing as I fought my way back to my feet. Already the pain was subsiding, the bleeding coming to a slow stop.

  “He’s not here,” Commander Shaw said, looking around the large open room only divided with broken glass walls. It was definitely a lab. The army of specialized equipment, from beakers to burners and other tools I could only guess at told us as much. “There was another room in Echo’s memory.”

  “Down the hall, here,” I said, following the right side of the room. A hall led to the room where Echo and Sam received their order to kill Amber.

  I was less prone to kick this one in. Instead, I reached for the door and turned the knob. It opened. The small room had been converted into a kind of holding cell. There was a bed with a dresser on the right, no windows.

  In the middle of the room, Monica’s father stood with an Immortal Corp guard holding a firearm to the side of his head. The guard positioned himself behind the professor, barely showing the top of his face.

  “Drop your weapons,” the guard said in a rush of words. “Drop your weapons. I’ve already sent the signal out. Reinforcements will be here in minutes. Drop your weapons or I put a laser in the doctor’s skull.”

  I didn’t know what the commander was thinking, but I sure as heck wasn’t going to lower my weapon.

  “X, what are the odds with my training that I can hit that guy in the forehead without hurting the doctor?” I asked.

  Everyone in the room, even Commander Shaw, looked at me like I was crazy.

  “Hey, I told you I’d kill him!” the guard shouted. “I’m not playing around here. I’ll do it! You don’t think I’ll do it?”

  “I thought you never wanted me to tell you the odds?” X asked, using her external speakers.

  “Humor me,” I said.

  “At this range, with your training and the calibration of your weapon, you have a ninety-one point seven five percent chance of neutralizing the guard without causing harm to the professor,” X answered. “If you move
quickly.”

  I squeezed the trigger one more time.

  The guard holding Monica’s father hostage slumped to the ground, motionless. A pool of blood spread out under his body.

  “Oh, thank you, thank you.” Professor Warden shook as he looked down beside him.

  “Let’s go,” Commander Shaw said, running over to the doctor and helping him from the room.

  I knew I should be moving right along with them. We needed to go. There was no update on the Galactic Government from Monica, but I didn’t think the dead guard in the room was bluffing. I believed that Immortal Corp reinforcements were on the way.

  Being in that room felt like anchors were connected to my feet. The three monitors that stood on the far wall in Echo’s memory were gone, but I could see them in my mind’s eye as clear as day.

  The events of Amber’s kill order played back in my mind. The three shadow figures on the screens. The look on Sam’s face as she received the news. I remembered it all.

  “Daniel, Daniel,” X said louder. “We have to go. I get it, it’s hard. But we have to go, right now.”

  X’s voice cut through my mental paralysis in a way Monica or anyone else’s hadn’t. I snapped out of my trance-like state to hear Monica on the other end.

  “Daniel, where are you?” Monica was asking in a rush of words. “Daniel, my father and the commander are out. Eric and Charles are still securing the door. Where are you? Do you need help?”

  “No, no, I’m on my way out,” I said, running from the room and traveling through the laboratory. “I’m coming.”

  I sprinted into the hall and out the door to the alley. Eric and Charles welcomed me with quick nods and we were all running down the alley together.

  My sixth sense went off like an actual alarm piercing the cold night air. I stopped almost at the same time I heard the voice.

  “Mijo,” the gruff voice called out to me from the night. “Daniel.”

  I skidded to a stop right before crossing the street.

  Eric and Charles did the same, lifting their weapon to try and find the voice.

  Commander Shaw and Monica’s father were already in the van.

  “If I wanted any of them dead, they would be,” the voice said from the darkness. “None of this matters anymore, Daniel. None of this matters. Your Phoenix friends can go. We already have what we needed from the doctor. It’s time to talk.”

  A cold sweat beaded across my brow. While Preacher’s familiar voice reached my ears, I had pinpointed his location. He was on the roof of the building opposite the secret Immortal Corp installation we had just liberated Monica’s father from.

  I looked up to see the silhouette of a man with a sword hilt pointed over his right shoulder. I couldn’t see much else in the darkness.

  Eric and Charles lifted their weapons. They followed my eyes and aimed at Preacher’s silhouette.

  “No!” I shouted. I extended a hand toward them to tell them to lower their weapons. I knew Preacher was right. He could’ve already killed them all if he wanted. Probably without breaking a sweat.

  My memory of the man was still hazy but somehow I trusted him. Everything inside of me told me this was a man I followed.

  “Go,” I told the Phoenix team. “Go, your mission is accomplished. I’ll find you.”

  “Daniel,” Monica said, pleading with me. “Daniel, come with us.”

  Two unmarked vehicles skidded around the comer of the street a block away. They sped toward us. Through the front windshield, I could make out the familiar dark uniform of an Immortal Corp soldier.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “Go!” I shouted again as I slapped a new charge pack into the butt of my MK II. I lifted the weapon with both hands, sighting down the barrel. “I’ll find you. Go!”

  “He’s made his choice and now we have to make ours,” Commander Shaw shouted. “Monica!”

  Eric and Charles were halfway into the van. The appearance of this new threat gave them pause. I shook my head. They took my cue and entered the van, closing the door behind them.

  With indecision in her eyes, Monica gunned the engine and sped off down the street.

  I walked into the middle of the road, pumping the lead Immortal Corp vehicle with tungsten steel rods. I fired three rounds into the front of the vehicle, sending a plume of smoke into the air. A fire started under the hood. The vehicle spun out of control to the left, crashing into a building headfirst.

  I went down to a single knee, aiming at the second vehicle hurtling toward me. A single shot blew out the right front tire, jerking the vehicle to the right. Like its counterpart, it hopped the curb and ran headfirst into the building.

  The acrid smell of smoke assailed my nostrils as the light breeze pushed the smoke from the vehicles in my direction.

  I heard cursing coming from the occupants as they stumbled out of the vehicles. Four came from the vehicle on the left and four from the one on the right. They lifted their weapons in my direction.

  It was clear to see that once these guards exited the vehicle they were unlike the other Immortal Corp guards we had come across thus far. These men and women were dressed in thick armor plates, some combination of fabric and metal I had never seen before. On their heads, there were slender helmets that fit their faces perfectly.

  Preacher was so quiet, I didn’t even hear him make the jump off the rooftop. The next second, he stood beside me. He looked at the Immortal Corp soldiers streaming out of the vehicles with his one good eye.

  “That’s enough,” he said to them just as much as he said to me.

  “Sir?” one of the guards asked in a stressed voice. “We were told the safe house was compromised. We have orders to capture any threat and secure the building.”

  “Unless whoever gave you those orders ranks higher than me, you have new orders,” Preacher said in a tone so hard, there was no room for argument. “Stand down.”

  The Immortal Corp soldiers looked at one another with grim eyes. Preacher must have seen the same thing I did. These guys had come for a fight and they weren’t going home without one.

  The four soldiers in each vehicle pointed heavy blasters in our direction. I knew we weren’t going to get out of this one unscathed.

  “I’ll take the vehicle on the left,” Preacher said to me just above a whisper. His voice was on the verge of sounding excited for the fight.

  There wasn’t an agreed upon time for the fight to start or some gentleman’s signal that told us the moment for killing was at hand. The street simply erupted in violence.

  I sprinted to my right, firing off a few rounds from my MK II. My round struck the enemy, I was sure of that. They did not, however, go down. The force of the rounds jerked their bodies back, but the heavy armor they wore withstood my rounds.

  Curses and grunts of pain were the best my MK II could do against whatever kind of armor they wore. On their part, they hosed me with fire as I ran for the safety of a doorway set inside a building to my right.

  “Could use some explosives or gas rounds right about now,” X said in my head. “Those rounds aren’t getting through.”

  “I know, I know!” I shouted back to her over the sounds of the weapon being discharged.

  I snuck a glance from the doorway I took cover behind to see how Preacher was faring.

  The man moved like a shadow. He was light on his feet and bounded more than ran toward his grouping of four enemies on the left side of the street. With a single move, his blade was in his hands.

  I could see the weapon for what it was now, a katana, expertly made by a true master sword maker. It was an Amakuni, a relic from the old world. How I knew all of this, I had no idea. The blade sparked a memory from my past. I wasn’t sure how I knew, but I did know I was right. The weapon in Preacher’s hands sparked awe and admiration in my eyes.

  Preacher was struck in the torso and shoulder despite his expert maneuvers in reaching the four Immortal Corp soldiers. The hits barely dazed him as he reached his opp
onents and began slashing at their armor.

  I took in all of this in a matter of seconds. There wasn’t time to watch. I would have loved to watch Preacher work with that iconic weapon in his hands. The four heavily armored guards on my side of the street turned their attention to Preacher as the screams of those he tore asunder filled the night air.

  I mentally prepared myself for my own run. My MK II wasn’t getting the job done. I’d have to get up close and personal. I checked the blade and axe at my belt then slowed my heartbeat.

  I saw the action in my mind of me making the run toward the enemy and landing among them just like Preacher had done.

  Then all the time for thinking and planning was over. I turned the corner and took off at a sprint. They were ten meters in front of me, taking cover behind the smoking vehicle as they aimed at Preacher and started taking shots.

  I caught movement from the corner of my eye as Preacher used the katana as an extension of his own body. Unlike my MK II, his katana was having little trouble slicing through their armor.

  I swore the blade hummed and glowed a dull red as it cut through both armor and flesh. Questions about the weapon would have to wait. Thanks to the distraction Preacher created, I was able to make the run without being hit, in a matter of seconds.

  I vaulted over the vehicle the four guards on my side of the street used for cover. I unloaded my MK II clip into the first Immortal Corp soldier at point blank range.

  I was so close, I actually pressed the barrel of the weapon against the center chest piece of my opponent. Even the high tech armor was no match for the hand cannon at such a close range. The rounds went through, sending one of the soldiers slumping to the ground.

  The other three Immortal Corp guards turned in my direction, aiming their weapons at me. Instinct more than anything else lifted my knife from its resting place in my belt. The first target, I struck in the throat with a quick jab from my left hand. I maneuvered around him to use his body as a shield against the incoming fire from the other two.