Scavenger Falters (The SkyRyders Book 2)

by Liza O'Connor

  “Are you saying I approved these, Jack?” Powell demanded.

  “Yes, sir,” Jack replied.

  The general stared at him as if he were going to argue that point but then gave it up. “Well I sure as hell wouldn’t have approved them if they had been laid out as they’ve been today!”

  “No, sir,” Jack admitted.

  “And whose fault is that, Jack?”

  Jack looked confused by his question.

  “I’ll make it easy. Who is my strategist?”

  Jack paused. “Now…or when these regs were approved?” he asked cautiously.

  “When the regs…” Powell stopped and calmed himself. “I apologize, Jack. You weren’t my strategist four years ago, were you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Who was my strategist?”

  “Cooper Jones,” Jack replied.

  “Why am I not surprised? That fool couldn’t plan worth a damn!” Powell muttered and then walked over and gripped Jack’s and Alisha’s shoulders. “When I compare my staff then to now, God, what an improvement!” He looked over to Logan. “Where were you stationed four years ago, Logan?”

  “At Broadtown,” Logan replied. “You’ve been my commander for eight years, sir,” Logan pointed out.

  “Really? Were you always this good?”

  “I haven’t changed much over time, General. Our characters are pretty well set by thirty,” Logan observed.

  Powell remained quiet for several seconds. “Well, enough time dwelling on our past errors. Let’s get them fixed. Jack, send an email requesting reassessment on these regulations.”

  “That may be politically difficult to do,” Jack warned.

  “MAC is a clever little machine. It was able to drop Reg 13.356 fast enough. Give it a run. But if it needs me to grease some political wheels, I’ll be perfectly willing to charm ladies…kiss babies…whatever it takes.”

  Alisha couldn’t help but smile. She seriously doubted General Powell was up to the task of charming socialites and their babies, but the threat of him trying might be enough to move mountains.

  “Logan, could you walk Alisha to the firing range? Colonel Riley has no doubt been waiting for ten minutes now. Give her my apology, but do not discuss the issue with the regs with anyone. The fact that no one has used it to date indicates that they weren’t obvious to our enemies either.”

  “Well to be fair, sir. They haven’t seen regs 13 and 14. The updated version hasn’t been published outside the Corps,” Alisha said.

  Just then an annoyed Riley entered the commons. “General, you did say Alisha’s practice was to begin at five?”

  “Yes, I apologize. We had a bit of a crisis this morning,” Powell admitted.

  Logan pulled the general to one side and whispered, “General, no one is more familiar with the regs than Riley. He’s got to be told.”

  Powell did not look pleased, but he addressed Riley. “We’ve got an issue with some of the 13 and 14 regs. Alisha doesn’t seem to think they’ve been published yet, but I don’t see how that’s possible given they’ve been in service for nearly four years.”

  “That’s because MAC places a four-year trial period on regs before releasing them to the public. It was a safety buffer, so we could identify problems and correct them before the public had a chance to insist we actually obey them.” Riley looked at Jack. “It was Jack’s recommendation, back when he was a cadet in strategic planning.”

  No one looked more surprised than Jack. “I appreciate the credit, Riley, but I have no memory of suggesting we hold off publishing Regs.”

  Riley shrugged. “Memory’s selective, Jack. I’ve got video to prove it was you.”

  “Well, it’s a damned good thing, because those regs can’t be published,” Powell said. “Sit down. Jack and I will fill you in. Logan, if you’d be so kind as to see Alisha to the firing range and give my apologies to the other Colonel Riley.”

  Chapter 10

  Logan gladly accepted the offer to escort Alisha to the target field. He could drop her off and still get two more hours of sleep before training began.

  The moment Alisha realized that Anna was to be her instructor in weaponry, she lost all signs of her early morning grumpiness. “Anna’s going to teach me to shoot?”

  “To shoot, to blow things up, to operate lasers, in general to create great havoc and chaos,” he teased, forcing himself to keep his eyes on the path. She was irresistible when she smiled.

  “It seems I do turn everything upside down,” she admitted.

  She had mistaken his teasing for criticism, he realized. “You certainly cause things to change, but in a good way, Alisha. You’ve done more good for this Corps in three days than I have in my whole life.”

  Alisha refused to accept his claim, and she was so adorably insistent on her view that he stopped arguing the point. While bringing her in would almost certainly be his finest contribution, it would never equate to her own efforts. But if it pleased her to win this argument, he saw no harm in it. In fact, it impressed him that all the praise and adulation had not gone to her head.

  “It is you and not me that is changing the Corps,” she insisted. “You’re the one who saw my potential and brought me in.”

  “I am,” he agreed, “but I had no idea how much talent was contained in that small package. And every time I think I’ve gotten a sense just how amazing you are, you go and do something else. Take for example those regs. When they were published four years ago, I dutifully committed them to memory and made certain my squad did the same. However, I failed to see the inherent flaws behind the well-meaning words. Yet, in a few hours of exposure to them, you saw the dangers clear as day.”

  Alisha credited her ability to see the problems in Regs 13 and 14 to her time both as a debutante and a runaway living on the streets. That was certainly not Logan’s background, nor any Ryder he knew. Ryders tended to come from the shrinking middle-income sector where young men and women graduated from high school, too poor to afford college, but too well off to qualify for poverty scholarships.

  “At dinner, my father and the other law partners would drone on for hours about theoretical issues of law. They sought clever ways to twist things to their own purpose, such as forcing the abortion of the unborn baby and then charging the mother with murder. Now that’s a twist of well-intentioned laws, if you ever saw one. Secondly, I learned that onerous laws on the books are completely ignored by the ones in power. Have you ever heard of a socialite having their baby aborted and charged with murder? I can assure you it doesn’t happen. If the baby’s father is a socialite, it’s declared a virgin birth, even if it’s months or years after she’s no longer a virgin. Half the girls I knew ended up being virgin mistresses until they conceived: living at home with their parents, playing the innocent debutante, while at the beck and call of some wealthy socialite.”

  Truthfully, Logan had never spent a second wondering how debutantes lived their lives. Until he had met Alisha, he had simply assumed they were pampered silly girls who were always happy because they got everything they ever asked for. Alisha’s picture was certainly darker. “Would they marry after conceiving?” Logan asked.

  “If the man wanted to marry…but most of these girls’ parents lacked the influence or money to ensure a marriage, so it was really left up to the girl’s ability to be pleasing. And they do anything to please. The street girls don’t know half the stuff the debs do.”

  Logan had thought there was no act too vile for a street girl. He could not imagine those vacant-eyed smiling faces in the web-paper having to service a man in such degrading ways. Suddenly, the thought of Alisha pleasing some socialite made him ill. He remembered how frightened she had been the first night, when she had thought he would demand sexual favors. He stopped and turned her to him so he could see her eyes. He had to know the truth. “Alisha, you never had to…”

  “No!” she replied, looking shocked and bewildered by his question.

  Logan released her a
rm, suddenly feeling very foolish for asking.

  She started walking again as she explained that her father had both money and influence.

  “I was to be the real thing: a real virgin bride. But I chose to live on the streets rather than accept the highest honor bestowed on a young lady of society.”

  He could hear the betrayal and anger in her voice. Her life as a socialite looked so bleak that a life in the streets still seemed preferable. While Logan might not know a damned thing about society, he had spent four years patrolling Capital. He knew enough about the streets to know most residents arrived in their early teens and were dead before they reached twenty.

  “It still sends shivers down my spine to think of you out on those streets,” Logan said.

  “I was scared at first, but then Betty took me in and introduced me to some of her friends, who became my friends. They all took care of me until I could manage on my own. I’d never met such kindness and integrity in my life. I know you think they’re nothing but criminals, but on the street, obeying the law becomes as frivolous as blueberries for breakfast. Everything’s about survival, and anyone who forgets that, even for a second, doesn’t get another chance.”

  God, he wanted to pull her against him and give her the safety and love she deserved. Instead, he could only place his hand on her back in a fatherly fashion. “I’m sorry you had to experience that, Alisha.”

  “I’m not,” she said. “At the time, it was hard. But if I hadn’t run away and ended up in that street, standing on Betty’s corner, then I wouldn’t have found my gramps in time to save him. I wouldn’t have gotten seed money from Denny to buy my catcher, so I could…retrieve things. And I wouldn’t have met you and joined the Corps. When I look back, my defining moment was that terrifying day when a tough, sassy street girl threatened to kick my butt in front of the next passing bus if I didn’t get my sorry ass off her corner.”

  “She sounds tough. Maybe I should recruit her as well,” Logan teased.

  Alisha shook her head. “She hated heights. Wouldn’t do a trick unless it was on ground-level. But she’d have made a fine ground soldier.”

  Logan noticed that her smile was now gone. “You speak of her in the past tense.”

  “She got beaten to death by—” Alisha suddenly stopped to rub the tears from her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, rubbing her back gently with the palm of his hand wishing he could offer her more.

  She wiped her eyes dry with the sleeve of her fatigues and started walking again. “I should know better than to talk about Betty. It always makes me cry.”

  “So that young boy I met. He lent you money for a catcher?”

  “Yeah. After Betty’s death, there was no way I was becoming a street-girl. This pimp named Marco was trying to get me to be a fancy-girl, but Carol assured me they fared no better and sometimes even worse than the street girls. Betty had introduced me to Denny when I was trying to find my gramps. Denny’s a whiz with the computer. He can hack into anything. I told him Gramps had been in the Ryders, so he hacks into Corps records and finds out Gramps died ten years ago. But there was something odd about the entry, so on a hunch he searched further and found a current address for Gramps in the projects. He even took me there, to make sure I’d come back alive. I knocked on the door, but nobody answered. I was about to give up, but Denny pulled out his bio-pad and opened the door for me.”

  “We found Gramps lying in a bed covered in his excrement. He hadn’t eaten or taken water in days. His heartbeat was so faint I was certain he’d die any moment. Denny knows a lot about medicines. He’s what you might call a poor-man’s doctor. He stayed with me the whole day and night in Gramps’ apartment. We cleaned Gramps, threw out the mattress and replaced it with one that Denny found in the basement of the complex. The next day, he paid the thousand-dollar fine the manager demanded because we stayed all night, and then he went out shopping. He came back with real food, new pajamas, and most important, diazaphine.

  “He couldn’t afford to keep giving away such a costly drug for free, so I needed a way to get money. Denny has uncanny instincts on where to make a buck. He thought, given my grandfather was a Ryder that I might have a natural talent for flying. So he borrowed a catcher from a Ryder that had passed out in Greely’s, and we took it out and gave it a try. I was up first time.” Alisha smiled. “I wasn’t even scared. It was like I had been waiting for this moment all my life.”

  Almost every sentence had something to make Logan cringe: hacking into the Corps computer; using bio-scans to enter apartments, lifting a Ryder’s catcher. These were things he definitely did not want to know about. Yet, the young boy had clearly saved Daniel’s life and kept Alisha safe and helped her fly so she could afford Daniel’s medicine. And without Denny’s intel on the Cartel and their weaponry, hundreds of troops would have died by those concussion launchers in the Broadtown offensive. Logan was glad he had let the boy escape that day in the cave, and not just because by doing so he saved hundreds of Ryders’ lives. This kid had to have a heart the size of Texas to offer such help in an environment that only rewards the survival of the fittest.

  Alisha was in the middle of her story about how they saved her grandfather, when they reached the gate of the firing range. He could see Anna taking out her anger on a target three hundred yards away. That poor target didn’t have a chance! And neither would he, if she turned and found them casually chatting.

  With reluctance, Logan interrupted Alisha. “I want to hear the end of this story, but right now, I’ve got some groveling to do. If you think the general gets grumpy at being kept waiting, you haven’t seen anything yet. Stay here until I calm her down.”

  The moment Logan tapped Anna’s shoulder, she set down the rifle and slammed her earphones against his arm.

  “You tell that general of yours if he’s got the balls to call me out for training at five in the morning, then he damned well better have the student here at five. I’ve better things to do than freeze my butt out here taking target practice. I practice regularly during normal work hours. I don’t need to come to this sorry-ass excuse of a firing range for my own personal benefit.”

  Logan didn’t even try to explain. He had seen Anna enough times when she tore into Riley to know that she’d quiet down once she’d spoken her mind. He was relieved the ear protectors had bounced ten feet away from them. It was unlikely she’d walk that far to retrieve them, and he sure as hell didn’t want her to hit him again. The ache in his left shoulder reminded him painfully that Anna had paid her way through college on a baseball scholarship as a pitcher.

  “And if this is how the general treats his colonels, then he can just go back to ignoring me! Because this is unacceptable,” she added, but with more space between the words, a clear signal she was winding down.

  “First, Powell does send his apologies. Alisha was up before four this morning so she’d be here precisely by five. Unfortunately, well actually, fortunately, Alisha uncovered another serious threat to the Corps this morning. Before you ask what it was, I am under orders not to say. However, Riley is by now fully informed, so I beg you to interrogate him instead.”

  Anna looked annoyed. “Uncovered another serious threat to the Corps?”

  “Yes,” Logan said, praying that she wouldn’t push him for details.

  “Damn, Logan. When you conjure up a flyer, you go the limit!”

  “Conjure up a flyer?”

  “That’s my new theory. No one can fly like Alisha, especially not in one month. No one gets promoted to captain one day and to colonel the next. No one single-handedly wins two battles in two sequential days. No one swims the Cully River and lives. And here we are on day three, and she’s saving the fucking world again. This is simply not possible. You’ve clearly conjured her up with magic. No one can be this good and…so adorable that you can’t help but love her to death.”

  Logan smiled. “I’m glad you added that last sentence, because I was about to go back and tell her to r
un like the wind before you shot her in a jealous rage.”

  Anna scoffed. “Nobody can outrun my aim.”

  “They can if you and I are wrestling for the weapon.”

  Anna looked as if she was going to challenge that claim as well, but instead punched him exactly where she had thrown the earphones. “You are a pretty tough fellow. You might give me a challenge in hand-to-hand at that.”

  “If you don’t mind, I’d just as soon never take that challenge. If I win, I’ll be scorned as a loser for fighting with a woman. And if I lose, then I’ll just be the sorriest excuse for a man that ever walked the planet.”

  Anna laughed. “I never thought you cared what people think.”

  “I care very much what certain people think. Regardless of whether I won or lost, if I were to harm a single hair on your head, Riley would beat the living tar out of me.”

  Anna smiled. “He would at that.”

  “Well, you don’t have to look so happy about it!” Logan complained.

  “It’s nice having someone always there for you.” She then looked at Alisha. “Even Wonder Woman needs her safety zone.”

  Logan just ignored her. He might threaten Riley off the topic, but Anna couldn’t be threatened off anything. She always did and said exactly what she wanted.

  Leaving Alisha in the hands of a placated instructor, he returned to his quarters to catch more sleep.

  Chapter 11

  Firing a rifle wasn’t as easy as Alisha had expected. It had a terrible kickback. She wondered how the First squad had managed to fly and shoot at the same time.

  “You’ll get use to the kickback,” Anna assured her. “Just don’t start anticipating it, or you’ll develop a reflexive flinch that will be hell to exorcise.”

  By the end of the session, Alisha could usually hit her target, although the occasional shot disappeared without leaving a sign.