Rebellion

by K A Riley

  “Team Portola was supposed to secure this level!” Cardyn shouts.

  In a defensive crouch, Brohn points down the long track to where Krug is inching toward an open staircase on the far side of the Armory. His soldiers alternate between firing at us and firing down at our people on the Armory floor.

  With the barrage of gunfire all around us, there’s no way we can get to Krug, but we also can’t let him escape up the open, five-level steel staircase that zigzags up the entire height of the Armory.

  “They’re trying to get to the stairs,” Rain calls out. “They going to try to get to the roof! We have to stop them!” But she knows as well as the rest of us that chasing after Ekker and Krug right now would constitute a group suicide pact of epic proportions.

  A swarm of bullets whizzes around our heads, and we all roll behind a low stack of iron-gray storage bins piled up against the wall.

  Our inability to move is infuriating, but we’re pinned down, and any attempt to charge at Krug would put us directly into a lot of lines of fire. Our only saving grace is that he’s pinned down, too. But he won’t be for long at the rate his men up here and the Patriot soldiers below have regrouped and are staging a major counter-offensive that has us on our heels.

  With things going the wrong way and with the Patriot soldiers lunging for fresh firepower from their weapons lockers, I’m considering suggesting we drop the whole plan and go into full panic mode when the massive double doors down below and on either side of the giant Armory slide smoothly open.

  The Armory doors let in a lot of things: fresh San Francisco midnight air. The sound of shouting and gunfire from the skirmishes underway outside. And two armies storming in from opposite directions to save the day.

  Through the south side doors, armed Insubordinates accompany an entire battalion of local police officers. Side by side, they run in as one before splintering off, leaping behind parked jeeps, desks, and other barriers firing their weapons at the startled and suddenly outnumbered Patriot Army.

  From the north side, a much different, unarmed, but equally lethal army sweeps in.

  It’s an army of a hundred kraa-ing birds, bursting into the Armory in a furious, swirling swarm, led by a large black raven with glistening, golden armor.

  26

  Render and the hundred ravens accompanying him blast into the Armory from the north with most of the Insubordinates and what appears to be a good percentage of the San Francisco police force—led by Captain Huang himself—charging in from the south. The shouting people storm in like a human wave of white-water rapids, churning in an advancing mass, their array of guns and rifles blazing.

  Bursting forth in a ferocious black storm cloud from the opposite direction, the ravens consume the open space, flocking and darting as they disorient, attack, and terrify the flailing enemy soldiers. In the chaos, many of the Patriot soldiers begin shooting randomly, their bullets zinging wildly through the Armory.

  From up here, we see swarms of marked police mag-cars glide to a stop in an intimidating cluster at the north and south entrances of the Armory. In an instant, the dark of night outside explodes in a firework of red and white emergency lights, their flashing beams creating a strobe effect inside the facility.

  Adding to the roar of the shoot-out, platoons of shouting police officers take positions behind their vehicles and fire at the Patriots. The soldiers whip around to face the unexpected assault from behind. Weapons are drawn and firing wildly on both sides. It’s a cacophony of chaos with the Patriots now outnumbered and outgunned.

  What two seconds ago had been a hopeless and deadly situation for us has just been turned on its head.

  Realizing what’s happening, many of the Patriots drop their guns. Some of the men try to run only to be corralled at the exits by our containment teams. Although many of the scrambling and disoriented soldiers try to force their way out and fight back, the Insubordinates have been trained too well for them, and they dispatch the Patriots with the moves they’ve been taught by Brohn, Cardyn, and Granden. The Insubordinates practically dance through the befuddled Patriot soldiers, treating them to what looks from up here like an excruciating buffet of straight punches, leg-sweeps, palm heel-attacks, elbow strikes, roundhouse kicks, forearm thrusts, stinging jabs, and a wide variety of painful takedowns. With what amounts to an almost eerie efficiency, as soon as any Patriot soldier hits the ground, an Insubordinate or a San Francisco law enforcer is on him, applying restraining cuffs, or, when necessary, finishing the solider off with a well-placed stun-stick to the base of the neck.

  It’s not all clean and bloodless, though. Some of the Patriots steel their jaws and re-load their weapons, determined not to go down without a fight. From positions behind parked vehicles, metal supply trunks, equipment lockers, and maintenance stations, the remaining Patriots continue to fire. Ducking down and snaking through the cluster of office cubicles, our teams continue their assault.

  Still pinned down, we watch helplessly as the battle rages below and as Krug begins to make his escape down the long walkway and toward the metal staircase on the far end of the facility. His group’s progress is impeded by Team Van Ness, the team Ethan is on. Ethan and his fellow Insubordinates aim their weapons and order Krug’s soldiers to stand down. As confident as they are, they’re no match for Ekker who has his gun out and is firing before anyone even knows he’s moved.

  He drops three members of Ethan’s team with precision shots to the head and single-handedly takes down the other two team members as if they were standing still.

  Rain screams out, “No!” and we’re about to dash over to help when another hail of gunfire, this time coming from behind us, pins us down again.

  Cardyn and Rain spin toward the group of Patriot soldiers who are shooting at us from behind a stack of heavy-duty steel crates on the mezzanine level about thirty or forty yards in the opposite direction. Dropping to the floor and laying down return fire, Cardyn and Rain yell at me and Brohn to go after Ekker and Krug. “We’ll cover you!”

  Evading a flurry of gunfire, Manthy rolls over to the wall and reaches her hand up to the input panel by a door. With her palm slapped down on the panel on the wall, she cries out to me and Brohn. “I’ll keep the landing gates and the rooftop doorway open for you! Go get him!”

  With Cardyn and Rain blasting away with cover fire at the soldiers behind us, Brohn and I bolt down the walkway. Running full-tilt and with the sound of gunfire all around us, we follow Krug and his entourage up the staircase, our boots ringing out like church bells against the metal steps. The electronic safety barriers designed to close off each of the four landings spark and fizzle and, thanks to Manthy, stay in their open, inactive position. As we near the top, just as Brohn and I are closing in, two of the soldiers turn and fire at us.

  Brohn tugs me behind him and takes a bullet to the shoulder that staggers him, but he keeps his balance and continues pressing on to the next landing.

  As the soldiers stop and take aim again, a swarm of ferociously kraa-ing ravens engulfs the two men like ravenous jackals on an antelope carcass. One of the men flails backward, hits the guardrail on the landing, and plummets to his death amidst the fighting armies below. The other man drops to his knees and disappears, screaming, under the razor-sharp talons and piercing beaks of the swarming birds.

  Brohn and I dodge around the scrum and continue to clamber up the stairs after Krug.

  One of the Patriot soldiers turns and looks down at us, his gun pointed right at my head. Render, his black feathers and golden armor flashing in the air, swoops in and knocks the soldier off the staircase before he has a chance to fire.

  The man falls past me and Brohn in a blur, and we watch as his body slams with a bone-shattering crunch, joining his dead partner on the floor below.

  Render is already banking and heading back into the fray before I even have a chance to thank him.

  I do manage to send him one question: Aren’t you supposed to be in recovery mode?

&
nbsp; His voice in my head says, Strength in numbers, before he banks off to rejoin his raven army.

  As Brohn and I resume our pursuit of Krug, Ekker, and their entourage, I realize the potentially fatal flaw in this course of action: There’s only two of us. Brohn doesn’t have to worry about getting shot, but Ekker could turn around at any time and fire at me, or, if he manages to get close enough, probably kill me with his bare hands.

  Still surrounded by his remaining guards and followed by Ekker and the woman in red, Krug is ushered through the giant synth-steel rooftop door, which swings shut and tries but fails, thanks to Manthy, to lock shut behind them.

  Brohn leans in with his shoulder, and we burst through the door to find ourselves out on the flat part of the Armory’s roof.

  Krug’s glistening chrome heli-barge, its humming mag boosters creating distortion waves in the magnetic field around it, is tethered to a landing post, its silver ramp extended out to the edge of the roof like a raft at a dock.

  Gunfire sprays at us from the heli-barge and forces us to dive for cover behind a raised ventilation shaft. With our backs to the cold metal, bullets whiz above and around us.

  “We can’t let them get away!” Brohn shouts. “Follow me!”

  Taking a deep breath, Brohn leaps up and charges toward the barge with me tucked in a crouch right behind him. One of the Patriot’s bullets skims past Brohn and pings off the armor inserts in my sleeve by my upper arm. It hurts, but not enough to slow me down.

  Up ahead of us, surrounded by his guards and with the help of the woman in red, Krug scurries up the ramp and onto the heli-barge.

  Led by Ekker, four of the soldiers accompanying Krug turn around at the edge of the rooftop to advance on me and Brohn.

  The first soldier charges ahead of Ekker and the others and throws a punch at Brohn. Brohn sidesteps the blow and slugs the soldier hard enough in the side of the head to dent the man’s helmet. The soldier staggers but recovers quickly and lashes out with a spinning back-kick, which Brohn easily evades. The second soldier—a gun in one hand, a ten-inch, serrated combat knife in the other—circles around behind Brohn while the other two charge at me in an effort to separate us. With me and Brohn split up and surrounded, the men close in on us.

  One solider takes a huge swipe at me, his knife blade flashing in the moonlight. I dodge the attack and crack his elbow with the heel of my hand while using his momentum to guide him into his partner. The two crash together, but one of them gets a shot off as he falls. The bullet glances off the chest-protection armor under my vest and spins me part way around.

  Distracted, I catch my heel on a length of pipe running along the rooftop and stumble backward. One of the soldiers turns away from Brohn and steps toward me. I regain my balance fast enough to duck the man’s fist thundering toward my head but not fast enough to elude another soldier who’s slipped around behind me.

  With Ekker entering the fight and lumbering toward him, Brohns screams out, “No!” as the soldier who has snuck up on me strikes me with a hard kick behind my knee causing me to stagger down. He follows that with a thundering forearm strike to the back of my head that makes me see stars and sends me toppling forward as he snags me by the collar and starts dragging me by the back of my vest toward Krug’s heli-barge.

  I’m kicking wildly at the air and clawing at the man’s hands, but he’s got to be twice my weight and ten times my strength. I can’t shake myself loose.

  Another soldier sprints down the barge’s ramp and grabs me by the ankles, and, together, the two men haul me onto the heli-barge as Krug barks out orders from where he’s standing with the woman in red and behind a wall of huge men.

  “Secure her! And go help Ekker with the other one!”

  Five soldiers leap from the heli-barge onto the Armory’s roof and charge over to where Brohn and Ekker are face to face, circling each other, fists clamped into wrecking balls. Swirls of wind whip through the night sky and stir up a vortex of debris along the rooftop. In the distance and over the soldiers’ shouts and the throbbing hum of the barge’s engines, I hear Ekker tell Brohn to give up.

  “I’ve done a lot of things in my life,” Brohn snarls. “Giving up isn’t one of them.”

  “Mine is a better way,” Ekker shouts. “I can give you the chance to be the first and best of your kind. With your power, you are primed to be the future of humanity.”

  “The future I want for humanity isn’t power,” Brohn says. “It’s peace.”

  “That’s a boy’s dream,” Ekker cries as he lunges forward. “This is the world of reality. This is the world of men!”

  Ekker and Brohn are both strong and fast. Brohn sidesteps Ekker’s attack, and the two launch into an epic struggle, throwing and blocking jarring punches and savage kicks. Ekker locks Brohn’s arm in a hammer-grip, but Brohn disables the move with a pinpoint strike to a pressure point on Ekker’s wrist. Ekker loses his grip, and Brohn attacks with a blinding flurry of fist and elbow-strikes that sends Ekker stumbling back and slamming up against a large iron exhaust pipe protruding from one of the venting ports on roof. Ekker is quick to regain his balance, and he catches Brohn with a couple of quick jabs and a haymaker that lands solidly on Borhn’s cheek. Brohn’s head turns with the impact, but he stays in full combat mode and even offers up a little smile to Ekker. With Ekker stunned and nursing what appears to be a bloody and badly broken hand, Brohn dodges one more feeble kick before engaging in a furious counter-strike. An elephant kick to Ekker’s midsection doubles him over, and Brohn presses his attack with a thunderous uppercut that snaps Ekker’s head back and causes him to pitch forward onto his hands and knees, blood streaming from his nose.

  I shout out to warn Brohn as one of the Patriots fires two shots into Brohn’s back, which causes him to step forward and drop down to one knee. Seeing a window of opportunity, the soldier stalks forward, both hands locked on his gun with the barrel aimed right at the back of Brohn’s head. Before he can squeeze off another shot, Brohn has already spun around and slung his combat knife at the man. The knife spins in a glimmering silver blur through the air and burrows itself handle-deep in the soldier’s neck just above his chest-protector.

  Brohn stands and gets ready to resume his attack on Ekker who is struggling to get to his feet when two more Patriot soldiers, guns and knives drawn, charge at Brohn from either side.

  I have no choice but to watch helplessly from Krug’s barge as I struggle and thrash against the two men holding me back.

  One of Krug’s soldiers is about ready to clamp immobilizer cuffs around my wrists when he pitches forward, bounces off my shoulder, and plummets over the edge of the heli-barge. I watch as he drops five stories down and winds up a broken slog of human-shaped lasagna on the ground below.

  His partner is spinning around to find out what’s happened when a projectile rips through his jaw just below the bottom edge of his helmet. A stream of blood explodes from the other side of his head, and he collapses to the floor of the barge.

  I look out to see Rain on the roof of the Armory—probably a hundred yards away, at least—squinting down the barrel of a sinister-looking sniper-rifle.

  I’m just giving her a grateful thumbs up when a solid thump to the side of my head staggers me back.

  Reaching out through a blurry haze, I claw at the clothes of my attacker as I crumple to the floor.

  Standing over me, a rifle still gripped in her hands and her jacket askew, the woman’s hood slides back to reveal a face I’ve known since I was six. It’s a face I’ve missed so much and one I’ve cried over and wished to see again. But not now. Not like this.

  Kella, her blond hair, long and matted, her eyes bloodshot and hollow, tosses her rifle to the floor of the barge and yanks out a pistol, which she aims at my head.

  Stunned, I shout her name, and her eyes glaze over like a splinter of recognition has lodged itself in her brain. In that split second, she shakes off any confusion and begins to squeeze the trigger.

  In
stinctively, as if I’ve been doing it all my life, I put my hand up and reach out to Kella with my mind. In a fraction of a second, my consciousness merges with hers. It’s not the same smooth connection I have with Render. This one is shaky. Glitchy. Unsteady. Like a baby taking its first steps. The pain is intense, but I push on.

  Disconnected from herself and stunned nearly catatonic, Kella lowers her gun, and, in a flash, fractured images from the last weeks of her life whisk by in a near-instantaneous tableau of lived moments through my mind:

  Kella, captured by Ekker in the mountains while she protected Adric and Celia, giving them and the kids with them time to escape.

  Another Emergent—a girl like Cardyn, who could nudge people into doing her bidding—captured and coerced by Ekker and turned against Kella.

  Ekker’s experiments on Kella in the basement of this very facility, in the very same prison-orb where he held me and Brohn just a few days ago.

  Kella’s raw-throated screams as the physical and emotional torture combined with the rewiring going on inside her head became too much to bear, and she surrendered her mind to Ekker.

  Kella, my dear friend and companion in peaceful times and in the depths of battle, sobbing, contorted in agony, reduced to a slave inside her own head, struggling to escape but unable to break free.

  Come with me.

  I say this to her without speaking, my mind to hers.

  But she resists me. She shakes me off.

  So, instead of asking, I push her mind with mine. Hard.

  Her eyes roll back, and she collapses onto the floor next to me.

  Only a few feet away but oblivious to what’s happening between me and Kella, Krug barks orders to his remaining soldiers. “Pull up the ramp! Get us out of here!” All his presidential power is gone. He’s desperate now. And scared. Nothing but a panicky child.