Warlord

by Mel Odom

  Others shot at the Terran military.

  Zhoh sighted in on one of the soldiers but held his fire for a moment. “Was the hack committed by the Terrans?” he demanded.

  “I can’t answer that,” Mato replied. His attention was still on his computer.

  “Find out.”

  Mato used all four of his secondaries to tap the keyboard. “I’m trying, General.”

  The Terran soldiers became embroiled in a skirmish on the patio as several of the bar’s patrons drew weapons and opened fire. An explosion ripped through the bar and one of the armored soldiers flew out over the railing and fell.

  As Zhoh watched and tried to figure out what he should do, a large-caliber bullet struck him in the chest and rocked him back. The trajectory of the shot told him it had come from the bar.

  He aimed at the closest armored figure and fired. “Kill the Terrans,” he ordered.

  He had no doubt that they intended to assassinate him. He would not back down from the fight. He sighted at one of the Terran soldiers and fired again.

  This time the soldier was knocked back and disappeared in the flash of another explosion.

  The Carmine Belelt-Cha

  North Makaum Sprawl

  1742 Hours Zulu Time

  Morlortai cursed as he watched the hacked drone hit one of the shops across the street and explode. A glance at the aircar dock at the Phrenorian Embassy showed him that Zhoh still lived. Even worse, it had been Zhoh who foiled his plan.

  The assassin made himself breathe out. At best, the drone had been a solid hope, but it hadn’t been a sure thing. He hated working without a true plan, and this had been put together on the fly.

  The gunshots and beam discharges behind him let him know he had other concerns, as well as his own safety to consider.

  “Sytver!”

  Hearing his name over the deafening thunder of weapons fire and the detonation of a grenade, Morlortai wheeled to face Darrantia as she ran toward him. Behind her, several of the bar’s patrons had opened fire on the arriving Terran soldiers. Evidently the civilians blamed the military for the attack. A section of the bar was in flames and was showered with debris from a high explosive.

  Doubtless several of those people thought the Terran military was conducting a raid because the soldiers were raising their security levels across the sprawl. If the patrons hadn’t been drunk or stoned or paranoid of getting caught, they might have realized the Terrans didn’t have jurisdiction here. However, those were armored soldiers and they were sporting weapons. So, jurisdiction or not, the Terran military had arrived.

  “I have her, Turit,” Morlortai said over the comm.

  “They’re tracking her, syonmor,” Turit said in his coldly efficient voice. “There’s no other way they could be on to her so quickly.”

  “I know. I’ve got a workaround.” Morlortai pulled a degausser from his kit and flicked it to operational mode. It was a little wider than his palm, a little thicker than his finger, and held a one-time charge that would knock all electronics within a meter of activation off-line.

  Unfortunately, there were also physical side effects on a being, too, because everything organic carried an electromagnetic field. Darrantia’s eyes widened when she spotted the degausser.

  “No!” she squawked.

  Morlortai didn’t give her a chance to protest any further. If she hadn’t been valuable as crew and there was no personal relationship with her, he would have killed her outright to prevent her giving up any of their secrets.

  But she was valuable, and he did like her.

  So he slapped the degausser into the center of her chest and activated it. The dampening field discharged immediately and dropped Darrantia in her tracks.

  Morlortai picked her up and slung her over his shoulder. He ran in the opposite direction of the arriving Terran soldiers. They’d gotten slowed down by the hostile guns among the bar crowd.

  A Lemylian warrior emerged from a doorway that led into the private rooms in the bar’s central hub. He was big and brawny and half dressed. He looked at Morlortai and held a Yqueu sniper rifle in both hands.

  “What’s happening?” the Lemylian demanded. His words were slurred and his reddened eyes couldn’t quite focus. “Are we under attack? Is it the Phrenorians? I knew they—”

  Morlortai swung his free arm up into the Lemylian’s throat and dropped him to his knees. As the Lemylian struggled to regain his breath and panicked that his paralyzed throat might be smashed beyond repair, Morlortai bent and scooped up the sniper rifle. He turned to the railing and stared at the Phrenorian Embassy.

  Zhoh stood there with his rifle to his shoulder. Like any good tactician, the Phrenorian was surveying the battlefield before committing.

  “Get moving!” Turit admonished.

  “A moment,” Morlortai said. He dropped to his knees at the railing, leveled the Yqueu rifle on it, and sighted on Zhoh. Calmly, he squeezed the trigger and felt it buck against his shoulder.

  The .50-caliber round struck Zhoh in the chest and knocked him back. Evidently the sights were off. Morlortai had been trying for a headshot where the heavy round might have a chance of penetrating the Phrenorian’s exoskeleton.

  Before he could fire again, a plasma charge slagged the railing only a meter away. The intense heat drove Morlortai from his position. He dropped the sniper rifle, grabbed Darrantia, and ran.

  That shot hadn’t killed Zhoh, but it had escalated the street battle into an all-out war zone.

  Morlortai threw himself into the nearest door, found the closest stairway, and joined a dozen other beings in fleeing the bar. By the time they reached street level, he was just one among many trying to leave the area.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The Carmine Belelt-Cha

  North Makaum Sprawl

  1743 Hours Zulu Time

  Kiwanuka’s faceshield lit up and revealed fields of fire inside the bar. She overturned a nearby table and took cover behind it. Darrantia wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Thankfully the tracker inside the Voreuskan was still operational. The blue dot held steady on her HUD and was only 22.3 meters away.

  “Stun setting!” Kiwanuka ordered as she made the change to her Roley. “We’ve got civilians here!”

  “You don’t normally see civilians this heavily armed, Staff Sergeant,” Pingasa said.

  “I don’t want to see them dead by our hands.” They were already so far off the parameters of the mission Kiwanuka knew the fallout from it was going to be toxic. She didn’t doubt that Halladay would stand with her to weather it, though.

  “Copy that,” Pingasa said.

  “I don’t think they’re civilians,” Culpepper said.

  Private Zhu got to his feet and scrambled forward, obviously intending to secure the people trapped in the snare, but a plasma blast caught him in mid-stride and knocked him over the railing. The aud dampers in Kiwanuka’s helmet quieted his screams as he plummeted.

  They ended quickly.

  “Status report on Private Zhu,” Kiwanuka said.

  Private Zhu isn’t responding, the AI said.

  “Is he alive?”

  Private Zhu still lives but is nonresponsive. His vitals are low.

  Zhu’s readings flashed over Kiwanuka’s faceshield. At least he was still alive.

  Kiwanuka popped up and targeted two people with weapons and knocked them both down with stun rounds. Six more “civilians” with weapons took their place. Kiwanuka wasn’t surprised. Makaum had started out as a powder keg, and the events of the last few weeks had only ratcheted up tensions.

  The whole planet had slid into survival mode and the resulting factions had marginalized everyone.

  “Lima Leader, this is Lima Control.”

  “Roger, Control,” Kiwanuka answered. “Lima Leader reads you.”

  “Be advised that someone has attacked the Phrenorian Embassy.”

  Kiwanuka peered over the table as heavy rounds smashed into it. From her position, she could just see
the Phrenorian Embassy and the aircar dock that listed dangerously, barely clinging to the structure. As she watched, the dock toppled in slow freefall.

  For a moment, Kiwanuka was mesmerized, watching the plascrete chunks and boulders come down in a rush, tangled with aircars. Almost at ground level, three aircars took flight with several Phrenorians huddled aboard.

  When the mass of plascrete hit the ground, several explosions detonated from the vehicles. Flames lashed out, splashed across the thoroughfare, and reached nearby shops.

  Kiwanuka dragged her attention away and she yanked a tangler grenade from her combat harness. She pulled the pin and lobbed the grenade toward a knot of men firing at her team.

  The tangler strands exploded out, then contracted in, snaring several of the gunmen into a knot.

  “Pingasa, Culpepper,” Kiwanuka said as she got to her feet and ran forward, “on me.”

  The two corporals formed up on her at once and matched her stride.

  Kiwanuka ran across the bar, vaulted overturned furniture, and stunned anyone who had a weapon and looked like he or she was ready to put up a fight.

  She focused on the blue dot on her faceshield till it winked out of existence.

  “Pingasa,” she said as she rounded the curved bar area where the dot had last been.

  “I know,” Pingasa said. “The tracker’s toast, Staff Sergeant. They must have realized she was chipped and burned it.”

  Kiwanuka cursed as she reached the spot where the dot had vanished. All she saw was a dazed Lemylian getting to his feet and reaching for an Yqueu sniper rifle a short distance away. She dropped him with a stun round.

  As she turned to search the area, a gel-grenade plopped against the nearby wall and pulsed.

  “Get down!” Culpepper roared.

  Kiwanuka threw herself down, but the concussive blast hammered her hard enough that she teetered on the brink of consciousness.

  Stim suite online, the AI said. Combat readiness required, Staff Sergeant Kiwanuka. You are under attack. Administering stims package.

  The chems raced through her body before she had a chance to refuse them. Her synapses fired on pure adrenaline and her head cleared, but there was already a dull headache lodged in the back of her skull.

  Four orange warning vectors flashed onto her faceshield.

  Pushing herself up, she looked in the direction of the attack and spotted four Phrenorians firing from the back of an aircar only a few meters from the bar’s railing. Autofire from a machine gun that had popped up from a recessed area in the aircar sprayed rounds through the railing, chopping it to pieces. The rounds hammered Kiwanuka and her team and drove them back.

  “Sting-Tails!” Culpepper roared.

  Kiwanuka hesitated only a second. Terran soldiers and Phrenorian warriors currently operated onplanet under a truce that put them outside the Phrenorian War. That détente was violated now, and there would be repercussions later.

  But first Kiwanuka intended to get her team to safety. They were outnumbered and the odds were growing longer.

  She brought the Roley to bear, activated the grenade launcher, and put three gel-grenades into the air. One landed on the machine gun mounted on the front of the aircar, the second missed, and the third landed in the aircar’s passenger compartment.

  The machine gun blew into shrapnel and the heavy fire went away. Below, the second gel-grenade blew out the roof of a shop, and the third explosive munition punched a hole in the aircar. As the vehicle sank, the Phrenorian warriors abandoned the aircar and leaped onto the open area of the bar.

  Tactical Command Center

  Fort York

  1744 Hours Zulu Time

  Halladay stared in disbelief at the screens depicting the street battle around the Phrenorian Embassy. He hadn’t been back to the fort more than three minutes before everything had hit the fan.

  Views from the different soldiers’ suits, as well as street cams they had access to, spread across the monitors at individual desks and on the big wall ahead of him. For the moment, he was staying with Kiwanuka’s armor, watching as she and her team battled four Phrenorian warriors.

  It was something he hadn’t been expecting to see on Makaum, and it brought back memories of when he’d fought the Sting-Tails himself. That had been a long time ago. General Whitcomb had kept himself and his people out of the hotspots for the last few years.

  Halladay knew the general was going to call for him at any second and demand to know what was happening. But the colonel also longed for the chance to strike back at the Phrenorians because he was certain they had no intention of letting the Makaum people offplanet. The Sting-Tails didn’t want only the planet’s resources. They wanted the labor force as well.

  “What’s happening?” Leghef asked. She stood beside him.

  “Sergeant Kiwanuka was working an op for me that I’d hoped would clear up the confusion about who killed Wosesa Staumar.”

  “Do you know who did that?”

  Halladay tensed as he watched the soldiers—his soldiers—locked in battle. “We think so, but we can’t prove it.”

  “Proving it would be helpful.”

  Halladay swung to one of the comm officers near him. “Where are those jumpcopters?”

  “Twenty-seven seconds out, Colonel.”

  “Show me.”

  The comm tech’s screen cleared and revealed a sat view of the area around the Phrenorian Embassy. As usual, interference showed around the embassy building itself due to electronic cloaking devices. The two jumpcopters sped through the sky toward the target zone. Fires had broken out all along the street where Kiwanuka and her team were.

  Halladay regretted sending so few people. If the Phrenorians had decided to go to war they could field a lot of warriors in seconds. Those soldiers he’d sent there would be dead in minutes.

  “Scramble another four jumpcopters,” Halladay ordered.

  “Yes sir.” The comm tech spoke rapidly into his headset.

  “Colonel Halladay,” another comm tech called. “I’ve got General Whitcomb online.”

  “Patch him directly through to me.” Halladay flipped his monocle down in front of his left eye and blinked as Whitcomb’s image flared into being.

  “What is going on down there, Colonel?” the general demanded. His face was red. “I gave you strict orders not to engage the Phrenorians.”

  “We didn’t engage them, sir,” Halladay said. “They engaged us.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “I’m getting reports that we attacked them.”

  “Reports from whom, sir?” Anger tightened Halladay’s voice, but he pushed it away because losing control now wouldn’t do any of them any good.

  “It’s all over the Zaysem Network.”

  Halladay covered the headset mouthpiece and caught the attention of another comm tech. “ZNet. Now.”

  The comm tech tapped keys and his screen flickered and displayed real-time vid of the battle taking place in the northern end of the sprawl around the Phrenorian Embassy. Like the sat view juicing through the Terran military feeds, the embassy building was blurred and out of focus.

  Block text on the screen read: TERRAN MILITARY DECLARES WAR AGAINST PHRENORIANS ON MAKAUM?

  The question mark was subtle.

  “Colonel?” Whitcomb said.

  “Sir, ZNet is owned by the (ta)Klar. It’s always in their best interests to keep us and the Phrenorians at each other’s throats with false reports and fake news.”

  “Did the (ta)Klar initiate the attack on the Phrenorian Embassy?”

  “No, sir.” Not that I’m aware of.

  “Disengage from that battle.”

  “Sir, we’ve got people in that area under fire.”

  “What are they doing there?”

  Halladay swallowed hard. “I sent them.”

  “That’s no-man’s-land, Colonel. You knew that and you sent those people anyway?”

  “They were follow
ing up on a lead that would take them to the assassin who killed Wosesa Staumar, sir.”

  Silence sounded for a moment, long enough that Halladay realized Whitcomb didn’t know who Staumar was. He barely kept himself in check. Only years of observing the chain of command helped him do that.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Whitcomb finally said. “Disengage.”

  “Yes sir.” Halladay had no intention of following the order. Not immediately. He wasn’t going to leave Kiwanuka and her team stranded to die.

  Whitcomb broke the connection.

  “Sir,” the comm tech handling the jumpcopters called.

  “Yes?” Halladay responded.

  “We just lost the jumpcopters arriving on scene.”

  Halladay stared at the sat view and saw flaming wreckage tumbling from the sky where the two jumpcopters had been. “What happened?”

  “Surface-to-air missiles mounted on rooftops took them out,” the comm tech replied in a hoarse voice. “Their screens lit up in warning, but they were hit before they could react.”

  Halladay cursed.

  “Those people were fired on from rooftops?” Leghef asked.

  “Yes,” the comm tech answered. “From civilian shops, Makaum dwellings, and apartment buildings.”

  Leghef looked at Halladay with pain in her eyes. “My people are more divided than I’d thought, Colonel. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Halladay said. “This is how war goes, and the lines that separate opposing forces and combatant and noncombatant shift every day.” He glanced at the comm tech commanding the jumpcopters. “Pull those jumpcopters back.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Not knowing how many pro-Phrenorian forces were in the area made sending in reinforcements impossible. Halladay scrambled to think of some way to salvage Kiwanuka and her team.

  Lieutenant Murad stood nearby watching.

  “Where is Master Sergeant Sage?” Halladay asked.

  “I don’t know, sir,” Murad answered. “The last I’d heard, he was in the med center.”

  Halladay opened a channel to the med center. “Captain Gilbride, this is Colonel Halladay.”