by J. N. Chaney
She ignored me.
"You could say thanks."
The look she gave me could have melted ice. "I don't know you. And if you think I'm going anywhere with you, you've got another thing coming."
"Your father sent me," I said as I spotted a pair of the elite guards returning. Before Elise could respond, I yanked her into one of the maintenance bays.
"What the hell?” She twisted to break free, but I pulled her right arm over her left and bear-hugged her so she couldn't move.
"Listen, kid. I don't care what you do as long as you don't get me caught. I was sent here to rescue your father, not you. If you can keep him motivated, then I've got a use for you. If you are going to be a spoiled brat, I'll just leave you here."
She yanked free the moment I relaxed my grip. "You don't know me. What gives you the right to call me a spoiled brat? I'm pissed off, okay? Why don’t you try being in a cage for a week?"
I stepped to the doorway and looked for the elite RSG guards. "What’s your story?"
"None of your business,” she snapped, rubbing her wrist. “Can we go now?"
"Only if you want to get caught."
She shifted uneasily, and started pacing, clearly afraid of going back in the cage. There was an animal desperation in her eyes that I hadn't seen in very many people her age. I thought she was fifteen or sixteen, but it was hard to tell. She'd been roughed up pretty good.
She pulled a strand of hair to conceal the worst of her facial bruises and tugged up the collar of her jumpsuit to hide the damage they’d done to her neck. The velcro still worked, but there was nothing to do about the way her captors had turned the legs of her pants into short-shorts and the top into a sleeveless half shirt.
“Put this on.” I tossed her the tightly rolled jumpsuit I’d grabbed after Hastings told me about her.
“What’s this?” she demanded.
“I don’t want you to catch cold.”
She aimed her middle finger at me, narrowing her gaze like she would stab me if she had a knife… but she slipped into the never-been-worn jumpsuit, appearing more self-conscious in the new garment than in her old stripper costume.
“There are rules. When I run, you run —"
"Yeah, I get it. Don't lecture me. I'm not an idiot. You're obviously some sort of hotshot commando and I'm just a kid you're trying to rescue so you can get my dad to do things. Story of my life."
"All right, then let's try this out. Time to go. Now!"
We ran across the hangar and slid behind a pile of loot the RSG had collected over the past several days. Most of it was food or salvage that looked reasonably useful.
"What your story?" I asked a second time.
She looked around the corner for pursuit, then scanned the area above us. For an untrained teenager, she was doing well. Her survival instincts might actually be useful. All things being equal, I still wanted a team of well-armed and well-trained commandos as my QRF.
"I didn't like what my father was doing. Hated it. So I ran away. These cock-holsters caught me."
"You know what, I'm not sure why I believe you, but I think we’re starting off on the right foot."
"We're not going to be friends. Don't try to show me how cool you are or that you want to listen to my drama. What the fuck’s wrong with your arm? Is your eye fake?”
“Don’t worry about me. Let's try this for your story. Some Union thugs moved you someplace relatively nice, and next thing you know, you're in a lockdown facility on Dreadmax. Something went wrong, and you tried to escape. More than once."
"You would know all that. They probably had you spying on me before they took me from school."
I counted the guards and tracked their movement. "There's going to be a chance for us to dart out the bay doors, assuming they don't close them."
"Okay," she said.
"We have some things in common."
"I doubt it."
"If you knew my history with the Union, you might be less skeptical. But I think you're right, we're not going to be friends. Partners, maybe. We both want to get your father off this place for our own reasons."
"I ran away because I thought it would decrease the Union’s influence on him," she said.
"Time to go,” I said, cutting her off. “You first, I’ll fall behind you. If you hear gunfire, run faster."
The hangar bay felt larger and more exposed each time I crossed it. We reached the street and continued into a narrow trench without safety lights. Elise had no trouble keeping up. Maybe she was a spoiled rich girl, but she could run like the wind.
We laughed breathlessly when we reached our cover and were sure no one was after us this time.
“Okay, I’ll tell you the other part.” She struggled to catch her breath. “I also wanted to piss him off.”
“Maybe we’ll be friends after all,” I said. “I’m really good at pissing people off.”
“I believe it,” she said, slating a glance at me.
“No need to get nasty, kid. Pay attention. There are a lot of dangerous people out here besides the RSG.”
“I’m not a kid,” she chastised.
“Maybe I’m just trying to piss you off.”
“Whatever. Don’t be a dick.”
“Does your father know you talk like that?”
“Yeah, he hates it. Called him a pussy once and he stroked out. I thought he was going to need an ambulance.” She laughed.
Something exploded near the RSG stronghold.
“Let’s find your pissed-off dad and get away from this place before the power fails.”
She didn’t have a witty comeback for that last nugget of information.
Fires burned throughout the short Dreadmax night. The way it orbited the planet and its own rotation seemed to fast forward time. It was like we’d spent a lifetime on this rusty hunk of junk already. Elise continued to be pissed off and moody at the same time as only teenagers could. But she moved well and kept her mouth shut.
This wasn’t her first time on the run. I wanted to ask her if she’d been a runner before getting locked up on Dreadmax. Now wasn’t the time. With darkness upon us, the crazies were out in force. The RSG search parties had lost direction, but they were still mobile and dangerous.
I found several supply lockers just like the one I had left Doctor Hastings inside of that had been opened and firebombed.
“What? Why do you make that face every time we find one of these?” Elise asked.
“I’m not making a face.”
“You are.”
“I’m a Reaper, trained by dark ops. Professional as fuck,” I exclaimed.
She leaned back against the wall where we were resting and bumped the back of her head against it several times. “Does everyone in this place have delusions of grandeur? There aren’t any more Reapers. My father always told me they weren’t real in the first place.”
I shrugged. “Maybe there aren’t.”
“What does that mean? You tell me you’re one thing, then tell me that thing doesn’t exist? I liked it better when you were an arrogant son-of-a-bitch. Don’t get moody on me. I’m the teenager, it’s my right. Do whatever adult super commandos do.”
“You don’t seem like a teenager,” I said as I peeked around the corner to look for a moving band of crazies. “Except for that crazy outfit.”
“They put me in this!”
“Uh-huh.”
She rolled her eyes.
I sobered. “You’re an old soul, Elise. Stop carrying the weight of the world and be a kid.”
“You grow up quick in my family. What’s up with all these firebombed structures? Why do you get tense when you see one?” She moved away from the wall, mimicking my watchfulness.
“They’re too lazy to clear buildings, so they just throw rocket fuel in there. Someplace on this decommissioned battle moon, there’s probably a lot of unused fuel. I have it on good authority that they stopped landing and taking off here a long time ago and chose to just drop people
in life pods. So the fuel tanks are probably full at some of the hangars,” I said, taking hold of her arm and guiding her into the next passage.
She complied more willingly than the first time I tried this move, somehow understanding that I wasn’t trying to push her around but only guide her toward safety. When she pulled her arm free, it was with much less attitude than before.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said as she moved along a metal wall three times her height.
I caught her glancing up at some of the walkways, but neither of us heard footsteps.
“Keep moving. We’re almost there.”
“Are you really a Reaper?” she asked the next time we stopped.
“I was.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Union assassins don’t retire, I imagine.”
“Strictly speaking, I wasn’t an assassin.”
“Have you killed anybody for the Union? Outside of a battle?”
“I have.” The words came out flat, either due to my tiredness or due to my guilt at having said them.
Some of her teenage meanness came through. “Then you’re an assassin.”
“I also kidnapped people and blew things up.”
“Like a terrorist.”
“Terrorists are imprecise. I never accepted collateral damage as part of my missions. Neither did any of the other Reapers.”
“So you only kill people who deserve it. That’s convenient.” She moved ahead of me and checked the next intersection like a pro. Her sweep of the trench opening into this area was quick but thorough and she stayed back as far as she could to avoid unnecessary exposure while still seeing what she needed to see. Maybe she’d learned the tactics gaming online.
“Why don’t we forget this conversation ever happened,” I said, moving in front of her to take the lead.
“You could just silence me. Isn’t that what people like you do?”
“Yeah, kid. Don’t push your luck. There’s probably a reason they sent me on this mission instead of a spec ops team.”
She didn’t have anything to say after that.
Two of the larger, louder vehicles without machine guns drove into the street we were crossing and spotted us immediately. The drivers revved their engines and squealed their tires as they pursued us. I heard the magnetic gravity boxes click on.
This made the vehicles faster, so long as Dreadmax didn’t lose gravity.
A few of the RSG thugs opened fire, missing us by several meters. I didn’t think they had the training to fire from a moving vehicle, but all they needed was one lucky shot.
Elise screamed, causing me to hesitate and look for blood. There wasn’t time to actually stop. She pulled away from me, cursing like a Soldier.
“I guess you’re okay,” I said. “Take that trench and head for the third gun turret on the horizon. If you get to it, you went too far.” I stopped behind a support beam and fired at the lead vehicle. The driver never touched the brakes despite several direct hits on the window.
I hadn’t really expected that to do much, but I had to try.
In the same breath, I sprinted after Elise. We ran into a passage that was far too narrow for the vehicles. I looked back but couldn’t see what they were doing. By the time we reached the next turn, I knew they were chasing us on foot, shouting challenges and threats but also communicating with each other.
These weren’t part of the military trained guards I had seen on the top level of the RSG stronghold, but they worked together fairly well. The pack instincts came to life at the sight of prey.
I looked up, hoping Grady was about to unleash hell on these assholes.
I didn’t have a lot of toys in my mission bag, but I had swiped one claymore from Sergeant Crank. Once I’d let Elise get pretty far ahead, I stopped and affixed the explosive device to a wall, making sure it faced toward the enemy.
If I’d had a tripwire or time to set one up, this would be perfect.
Bullets ricocheted near me. I moved back as far as I could with the detonation plunger, hoping the wires didn’t get tangled on one of the jagged edges in the narrow passage.
Two of the RSG dogs ran past the device. The bulk of the group came close behind them, also stopping to shoot from time to time despite their friends being in the line of fire. Weapon safety wasn’t their strong point.
I hit the plunger, blowing five or six of the gang members into bloody chunks, then raised the HDK to dispatch the other two. One got so close, I felt the blast of his weapon’s muzzle as I sidestepped and shot him in the throat.
“Okay, X. You can keep track of my kills, since we’re about to go off the rails on this mission.”
“About to, sir?”
There wasn’t time to be sure I killed the men. I ran to catch up with Elise and found her crossing the last open area before we reached her father’s hiding place.
Dreadmax continued to turn. The distant sun came up on the horizon, too bright to look at and too sharp to paint an even glow over the surface. Harsh shadows reached and twisted like something from a drug-induced nightmare.
Grady’s dropship flew at me with the sun behind it.
“Cain for overwatch, I’m being pursued by hostiles. A little help, please.”
What I expected was the roar of an auto cannon or a cluster of rockets. Instead, I saw Grady drop to the surface and charge forward with his HDK pulled tight to his shoulder and his attention on the people he was about to kill. The ship initiated cover fire, shredding the walls around my pursuers and taking out anybody who had made it through my claymore trap and wasn’t deterred by the men I’d already slaughtered.
“Keep moving!” Grady shouted. “I’m right behind you.”
“Where the fuck is your team?”
“Not authorized. It was a snap decision. Don’t make me regret it.”
I heard him grunt a curse about the time I reached the supply closet where Elise waited, wide-eyed and breathing hard.
“They shot your friend!”
“Not my friend. He’ll be fine.” I opened the hatch to the supply closet and saw the doctor waiting, sweating terror through his skin as he crouched near the back of the small room. He had the look of somebody who had been in complete darkness for too long.
“I kept the lights off. I didn’t know what to do. There were so many of them.” He wasn’t a small man, but he looked small right now, crouching defensively.
“Get your dad, kid.”
Elise ran to her father and embraced him while I went back to check on Grady. My old friend came hobbling toward me with a big smile on his face.
“You’re in a pretty good mood for somebody with a gunshot wound.”
He kept the smile as he clenched his teeth against the pain, tossing me a first aid kit. “Help a brother out, will you.”
After checking for further pursuit, I peeled away a section of his thigh armor and found one of the bullets had penetrated. It wasn’t deep, but the bruise around the wound would be debilitating for most people. Stopping the blood was easy, but he was going to be slowed down for a while.
8
“NOT BAD, Hal. You got the principal plus one,” Grady said as we moved into a new area and hunkered down to see which way the RSG and the crazies moved. There were a lot of both despite the sun illuminating the surface of Dreadmax with a harsh white light.
“We need to get to a pickup site,” I said.
“I have the ship coming back around. Once we confirm you have the principal, we have clearance to pick you up. I told you this would be an easy mission,” Grady said.
I noticed Elise and the doctor were watching him carefully. She kept her mouth shut, almost like this was too good to be true.
The girl had good instincts.
I shook my head. “It’s too hot for an LZ here. They have heavy machine guns on vehicles, and I saw at least one crate of surface-to-air rockets in their stronghold.”
There was also a theory I wanted to test.
“Dammit,
Hal. We’re done. This mission is over. You have the principal and his daughter. The dropship can withstand small arms fire, you know that. You don’t have to make up some story about rockets.”
“I saw the rockets,” Elise said. “Before he came, they used to shoot them off like fireworks. They’re a bunch of psychopaths.”
Grady clenched his teeth and hobbled to the edge of our hiding place to look for threats.
“The plan they gave during the briefing designated a shuttle bay for deployment and pickup,” I said. “That’s where we’re going. Their spec ops team can get help from Soldier security if they need to.”
“I should’ve known better. Nothing is ever easy with you,” Grady said. “That’s five kilometers from here. On a good day, any place other than here, that wouldn’t be too bad, even with this scratch on my leg. But we’re on the clock here, in case you forgot. And there’s a lot of bad guys roaming the streets.”
“You got that part right,” I said.
“What did you do to piss them off?” Grady asked.
“Well, for starters, I stole their prize doctor, who seems so valuable, even if they don’t really know who he is. I also killed a bunch of them.” I paused to let that sink in. “I’ll take point, you can act as the rearguard if you can keep up. I don’t know about the doctor, but the kid is fast.”
“I’m not a kid,” Elise declared.
“She’s not a kid,” her father agreed a half second later.
I ignored them both and so did Grady.
“Mission Control isn’t going to like this,” he commented. “I doubt my decision to help you has earned me any points. Briggs and his bosses about shit kittens when you jumped early.”
“Good. Serves them right. They should have let me plan this operation. What have you done to get the innocents evacuated?”
“I was told it’s handled,” he said with a shrug.
“You’re such a dick. You know that’s bullshit.”
“They’re sending a maintenance team to repair whatever is failing, give them more time to sort out the consequences of Dreadmax going offline with innocents on board.”
His claim was almost believable. If I had to rescue a large number of people from this place, the first thing I’d do was buy some time. So maybe my old friend wasn’t totally full of crap. But there was something he wasn’t telling me. The guy looked guilty.
