Burning Bright: A Paranormal Space Opera Adventure (Star Justice Book 5)

by Michael-Scott Earle

  “At least six,” she said.

  “I’m going to have to shift,” I said. I didn’t want to right now because it meant that I’d be out of commission as soon as we got back to Persephone, but if I didn’t switch, we might not make it back there.

  “Blondie, see if you can kick the other door closed,” Juliette whispered to Zea.

  “You are fucking crazy! There is no way--” Zea let out a gasp, and I turned to see a drone float in through the single open door. It looked like a thirty-centimeter wide metal eyeball. The robot made absolutely no noise as it traveled through the air, and I guessed they had been the source of Juliette’s uneasy feelings of being watched.

  The drone also had a small gun mounted on the bottom, and it spun the weapon toward Juliette.

  The redhead was surprised by the appearance of the robot, and she fumbled for the pistol at her hip. I reached for one of my own weapons, but both of my hands were occupied with pushing me off the ground. Zea was prepared ,though, and a single shot from her pistol pierced the floating machine in the middle of the eye. It zipped through the air like a punctured balloon and then slammed into the far wall.

  Gunfire started streaming through the doorway again, and I heaved my bleeding body the rest of the way off the ground.

  Then I let the animal take my body.

  It screamed through my soul as my spine grew. The pain in my chest was temporarily forgotten as the brief fires of agony spread through the rest of my nerves, muscles, tendons, and skin. My feet expanded and pushed up against the sides of my specially crafted boots. My legs expanded and the jeans I wore creaked at the seams when the muscles there pushed against them. My human teeth fell out as the sharp tiger ones punched free of my gums. Then the lights from our suits turned a yellowish-reddish as my eyes completed their transformation. My chest no longer hurt from the wound, but it pressed against the material of my chest armor. It wasn’t uncomfortable, so I was glad I picked the bigger size.

  “Let’s try the back,” I growled at the two women. Zea nodded, but Juliette’s eyes were open wide with surprise.

  “That’s still unbelievable.” she gasped at me as another spray of bullets entered the doorway. She waited until there was a pause in the fire, and then she darted over to where Zea and I stood.

  “Watch your eyes,” I said as I pulled one of the flash grenades out of my pocket and flipped the pin out. I had a guess as to where the shooters were standing, but I figured they were all looking at the doorway, so I rolled the grenade about a meter past the exit.

  The flash went off and caused a chorus of screams to sound from outside.

  Then we were running toward the back of the building.

  “I’m gonna bet money that they have us surrounded,” Zea hissed as we ran.

  “Are you always this cheery?” Juliette said.

  “I am when it’s Elaka Nota,” Zea replied.

  “Here,” I said as I turned a corner.

  My sense of direction had always been better than average, and I knew we were running toward the opposite side of the building. Sure enough, a half minute later we were at the door marked “EXIT,” and I motioned for the women to stand back before I threw it open.

  There was an immediate hail of gunfire, and the three of us cursed as we stepped away from the entrance. The door swung open with the flow of bullets, but then it bounced back on its hinges, and I was able to close it without reaching my arm out of the safety of the doorway.

  “What now?” Zea asked.

  “Up,” I said as I pointed back in the direction where we came from. There had been a door marked for stairs some ten meters down the hall, and I started to run toward it.

  “Uhh. How are we going to escape if we go up?” the hacker asked after we had entered the stairwell.

  “We aren’t,” I said as I shut the door behind us. “Run to the top floor.”

  “Will they take our surrender?” Juliette asked.

  “No,” both Zea and I answered as we ran up the steps. The building was only four floors up, so we made it in a quarter of a minute. At the top, I led them down the hallway toward the rear of the building again.

  “How is your injury?” Juliette asked.

  “Fine. I think it stopped bleeding,” I reported.

  I saw a light up ahead. It was leaking in from the bottom of the door near where I thought the rear of the building was.

  “Turn off your lights,” I ordered, and the two women turned off their lights a second after me.

  “What’s the plan?” Juliette asked as we all stood in the darkness.

  “I need to figure out where they are located. Then I’m going to take them out.”

  “Uhh. When you say ‘take them out,’ I get the feeling you are going to do something really fucking crazy. Like, leave us up here, jump out a window, and kill all of them one by one.” I couldn’t see Zea, but I knew exactly what her face must have looked like from the tone of her voice.

  “Something like that. Let’s go to the door with the light.” My eyes were getting used to the darkness, and I silently crossed the distance of the hallway before I pushed open the door.

  It was a large office, and I guessed must have been used by one of the bosses of the Nebula Gammon station. It was a good twenty meters squared, with two leather couches, a wide drafting table, and a thick metal desk. Two sides of the wall had windows, and I saw beams of light from the street dance across the glass.

  “Follow me inside and crawl to the right corner where the desk is. That is where you both will wait for me.” I pointed in the direction of the desk, and the two women nodded.

  Then I dropped to my belly and crawled across the office toward the far windows.

  The Elaka Nota soldiers must have known we were up in the building. There were too many flashlights shining into the windows for me to believe otherwise. I guessed my flash grenade fucked up whatever thermal vision they were using, but I doubted the effect would last for long. As soon as their helmets recalibrated, they would probably turn off the lights. Then I’d be blind while they could see.

  I made it to the window farthest from the door to the office, and I quickly peeked down below. There were two armored figures down on the back alley, and one on the second floor of the adjacent building. I could also see a flash of light coming out of our building, so I guessed there was someone on the floor beneath us.

  Shit.

  I crawled backward from the window until I was back near the door to the office, and then I glanced out into the hallway to check for Elaka Nota soldiers sneaking up on us. There weren’t any, so I closed the door before I returned to Zea and Juliette’s corner.

  “There is one in the building below us. Shoot anyone who comes through the door.” As I spoke, I pulled the new submachine gun out from under my coat and extended the stock.

  Then I looked at the window.

  “Adam, I was fucking joking about the window,” Zea hissed.

  “I wasn’t,” I replied, and then I sprinted across the room.

  I flipped the safety off on the gun and peppered the glass with a burst of bullets. The gun’s rate of fire was way higher than I expected. The trio of shots sounded as if it erupted from the barrel in one continuous noise, and the window turned into a crystalline spray of confetti a second before I jumped through it.

  I was flying through the air of the dark city.

  My submachine gun twisted downward as I sighted upon the flashlight of one of the Elaka Nota soldiers. I squeezed the trigger twice as I aimed at the point of luminance, but I had no idea if I’d hit them.

  I now had to worry about the building I was leaping toward, so I twisted my gun back and shot at the window where I tried to aim my fall.

  My gun spat again, and the glass window of the other building cracked a half-second before I broke through it.

  I rolled into the room and pointed my weapon toward where I thought the Elaka Nota soldier on this level was. He was spinning around to aim at me, but he’d been
surprised by my senseless act of stupidity, and I squeezed my gun’s trigger before his body had even turned a few degrees. The bullets from the submachine gun tore into him like an armada of metal wasps, and his blood sprayed out on the wall behind him.

  I rolled backward toward the window I just jumped through and popped up on my feet. Then I aimed my weapon out the glassless window toward the building where Zea and Juliette were hiding. The soldier on the level below them heard the gunshots and the glass breaking; he was standing right next to his window looking for the source of the sounds. I throttled the trigger of my gun and emptied the rest of my magazine into the figure. He fell down below the edge of the window after the eighth or ninth bullet penetrated him, so I guessed he was dead, but I couldn’t confirm it.

  Depending on how my aim was while in flight, there were either one or two assholes down on the street below me. I ducked away from the window a moment before the bullets hit the edge of the building, and the amount of gunfire indicated that both of the assholes were still alive.

  Looks like I wasn’t quite the most super of super soldiers.

  I shoved a fresh magazine into the submachine gun and pulled out another one of the flash grenades from my pocket. The pin came off with a flick of my claw, and then I tossed it out the window in the direction I knew the assholes were located. I heard the thing bounce on the street before it went off, and two voices screamed with agony when the light blinded them.

  I leaned out the window and twisted toward the loudest of the screaming voices. My opponent was wearing a helmet, but it looked like it either wasn’t running any sort of vision correction augmentation, or it was still messed up from my earlier grenade. I almost felt bad for him, but these assholes imprisoned Eve for decades, they could go fuck themselves.

  My fingers tightened on the trigger of my gun.

  A spray of my bullets hit him, and while the first few seemed to bounce off his armor, the fifth or sixth punched through him and ended his life.

  I pivoted to the second man. He was prone on the ground, so I guessed that one of my earlier shots I took while in mid-leap actually hit my target, but it hadn’t killed him, so he’d been able to shoot me back. It didn’t matter now, I squeezed the trigger of the submachine gun and the rest of the magazine emptied into his body.

  I ran over to the corpse of the man I killed as soon as I came through the window. He was carrying a pistol sidearm, carbine rifle, and ammo belt with four grenades on it. I reloaded my submachine gun, folded the stock in, hung it back in its place under my jacket, and then yanked the man’s helmet off his head.

  As I thought, there was a radio on the inside of the dome, so I yanked out the communication speakers and wrapped them around my head before I began to remove the man’s weapons, ammo, and grenades.

  “Whiskey Squad, report,” a voice came over the feed, but I didn’t answer.

  “Whisky Squad, we heard automatic fire from your side of the building. Report,” The voice demanded again.

  “Roberts and Andrew both screamed, sir,” another voice said. “Then we heard more shots.”

  “Victor Squad, what is your location?” the first voice asked.

  “We’ve reached the rooftop of the building east of target. We don’t have a visual on Whisky Squad, but we do see the light from behind target building. Awaiting orders.”

  “I want one on the roof, the other three approach from the north alley. So circle up and then back around.”

  “Roger that, sir,” the voice replied.

  I added the pistol and fragmentation grenades to my own belt and jacket pockets. The pistol was a smaller caliber than the two I currently wore, but the bullets looked to be the same size as what I was using in my submachine gun. I took all of the equipment, and then I grabbed the carbine and five magazines for it. The weapon was much beefier than the submachine gun, and it also had a holographic sight mounted on top. Not that I needed it in the darkness, but it would be a good addition to Persephone's armory.

  If I made it out of here alive.

  The voice on the radio had told Victor Squad to come at me from the north alley. I guessed the commanding voice meant my left side, and I crept toward the windows in that direction. This was another office type building, but most of the desks and terminals were looted, so I had to carefully step over broken pieces of furniture on my way to the window.

  There were a single desk and broken terminal screen near a window. I was able to position myself against a pillar and glance out onto the alleyway using the reflection on the cracked screen. It wasn’t a perfect view, but it meant that I could watch for movement or light without pressing my face against the window.

  A half minute passed before I spotted a flicker of light down below in the reflection of the monitor.

  “Victor Squad, update,” The voice on the comms ordered. The volume was a bit too loud, but I didn’t know how to adjust the audio through the bare wires I ripped out of the helmet.

  “We are approaching,” a woman’s voice whispered. “No sign of activity.”

  I saw more of the figures below in the alley. They would have been impossible to see with normal human vision and very difficult in my human form, but the shifted tiger-man eyes could see in near darkness. The light from the soldier’s helmet displays gave me enough illumination to be able to count them. There were three, and they slowly moved toward the alley intersection where I leapt through the air. Once they got there, they would see the bodies of the two men from Whisky Squad that I killed.

  I decided it would be best if I killed this group before they got there.

  I scanned the windows where I stood to see if there was any way I could open them. I didn’t see handles on any, but I did see a cracked pane a few meters closer to the corner of the wall where I stood. Moving over there would probably alert the soldiers below me that I was up here. So I crept back into the room and away from the window. Then I made my way over so I stood in the opposite corner.

  I didn’t have a visual on my enemies anymore, but I recalled about how fast they were moving through the alley, and I figured they would be below the hole in the window within a few seconds. I pulled out one of the fragmentation grenades, flipped out the pin with a flick of my thumb. Then made my best attempt to fling the bomb through the hole in the window without breaking any more of the glass.

  My aim was true, and the grenade sailed through the window without a sound. I lobbed with just enough heat on the grenade to get it out of the building, and then I saw it drop almost immediately. I heard it bounce, I heard a gasp of surprise, and then I heard the explosion’s roar. The bomb was actually much more powerful than I thought, and half of the windows on my level shattered from the blast.

  I dashed to the edge of the window, but I kept my eyes level so I could see the surrounding rooftops. Sure enough, I caught the illuminated dot of someone’s gun sight on the adjacent roof, so I pointed my newly acquired carbine toward the dark shape. I hoped the explosion would have distracted my target for a few seconds, and maybe they wouldn’t have their attention on me, but their guns flashed as soon as I pulled my own trigger, and I had to dive down below the seam of the window. A burst of bullets tore through the remaining glass on the windows above me, and I crawled to the left so I could pop back up with a new position.

  “What was that? Victor Squad, report,” the voice asked.

  “There was a grenade. I think they are all dead. I had visual and exchanged fire with a figure on the third floor,” a voice replied through my makeshift headpiece.

  “Keep an eye on the target. Bravo Squad, I need you to move from your position at the entrance of the target building and move to the north. Look for the enemy on the upper floor.”

  “Roger, Control,” another voice answered. “We are moving,”

  “Charlie Squad, I need eyes over that area. Where are your drones?” the man they called Control asked.

  “You asked me to move them toward the escape route. I can return them.”


  “Return them. My suspicion is that they are trapped in one or both of these two buildings.”

  “Roger, Control,” Charlie Squad reported.

  “Uniform Squad, enter the primary target and sweep it for the targets. See if you can locate Whiskey Squad.”

  “Roger, Control. We are moving.”

  I let out a mental growl and tried to figure out what to do next. I guessed Uniform Squad was entering the building where Juliette and Zea were hiding. That wasn’t good, but I also had another squad heading in my direction. Then there was the fucker on the other roof waiting for me to make a move and a group of drones that would be here in a few dozen more seconds.

  I was about to be pinched from four different directions.

  My mind spun for a precious second as I weighed the various strategies. None of them sounded feasible, but there was one strategy which always seemed to serve me well up until this point in my life. It was a belief the monster in my soul agreed with: always protect your women.

  I crawled back more toward the center of the room where I killed the first Elaka Nota soldier. I didn’t know if the gunman on the roof could get a clear shot at me from where I was, but I didn’t want to risk it, so I tried to keep my body away from any angle where he might be able to set his crosshairs on me. As soon as I made it back to the window I crashed through, I poked my eyes up over the lip of the shattered frame and glanced back at the building where Zea and Juliette hid. I wouldn’t be able to jump across and up to the same floor they were on, but I could probably cannon ball through the second-floor window. Then I would be in between the women and Uniform Squad.

  It wasn’t the best plan I’d ever come up with, but I would have to make it work.

  I crawled back to the rear of the building, crouched on my feet, took a deep breath, and prepared for the gunman on the roof to put a dozen bullets into me as soon as I started running.

  Then I started sprinting across the room.

  Sure enough, the fucker on the roof saw my movement and started shooting, but I could run fast in this shifted form, and all of his shots hit the floor a meter or so behind me. Then I was leaping through the window, flying through the alley, shooting out the other window, and crashing through in an acrobatic roll that actually surprised me. I had a dozen cuts on my arms, but they healed as soon as I came to my feet and dashed through the door leading into the hallway.