“I’ve got a few things to tell you as well,” Sally said, grabbing my hand and pulling me into the living room. Kyra followed closely behind us.
A man rose from the couch as we entered, he gave us a quick little nod and then moved towards the back of the house. Sally motioned for us to sit on the couch and pulled up a chair. Both of us looked from her towards where her husband had disappeared and then back at each other. What had just happened there?
“Oh, don’t mind Kyle. This is my thing as he likes to say. He doesn’t like to be reminded that I used to play for the other team. So we’ve had a few setbacks since you landed.”
“Setbacks?” Now I was a little worried. They had setbacks how? As a couple, as a family, at work, in their relationship? The thoughts kept swirling around in my head. Hopefully, Sally would put me out of my misery soon.
“Yes, they tied the mercenary contract back to us, which was to be expected.” She looked us over almost as if trying to decide how much to say. Sally took a deep breath to steady herself and continued. “Today the company crashed our accounts, said they were calling in all our debts. They also sent Kyle home from work. We’re not sure what we are going to do with three kids to feed.”
Well, that was just shit. We had talked about what the company might do when they traced the contract back to Sally, but we never thought they would go this far. Firing her husband on a planet where you could only really work at one place was devastating. It was basically a death sentence. Especially when the company owned the house you lived in. They wouldn’t last more than a month out on the street.
Kyra must have picked up what I was feeling because she squeezed my hand. That little touch gave me the power to continue. “Sally, I can’t thank you enough for doing everything you have done to help my family. We don’t have much right now, having gone through a little drama of our own, but we do have enough to get you set up somewhere far away from here. You and your family could have a new life.”
She looked at Kyra to confirm if we could actually do that for her. “Anywhere you want to go, we can get you there,” Kyra said with a bright smile.
“Thank you so much.” Sally stood and pulled both of us into a quick hug. The relief she felt was plainly written across her face.
A knock sounded at the door and Sally seemed startled. That wasn’t good. If she wasn’t expecting company, then it could only be the company knocking at the door. The sound came again, but heavier this time, and more urgent. Fuck, this was going to be bad.
Kyle came out of the bedroom and walked towards the door. As he passed us, he didn’t even look in our direction.
Sally rose from where she embraced us and turned towards her husband. Her cheeks flared red, and I knew he was in for it. “Kyle, what have you done?”
“What have I done!” he roared spinning around to face us. “What have you done? Bringing a fugitive into our home. Your consorting with criminals cost me my job. I had to fix the problem you made, our kids deserve better.”
“Better than me, or better than a father that would betray his wife?”
Oh man, there really wasn’t an answer he could give that wouldn’t ratchet this up to the next level. “Maybe we should go?” I said tentatively.
“Oh, someone is waiting for you outside right now, murderer.” He continued towards the door.
“Kyle!” Sally screamed in shock.
Kyra stood and moved towards Kyle. She had a grace about her that was damned impressive. Even more so when you realized she was an engineer and not a dancer. Her hand dipped towards her thigh and the next second she had her pistol out and pointed at Kyle’s head.
“Stop right there.” She sounded calm, as if she were ordering something to drink from the bar, and it had me scared shitless.
“Kyra, what are you doing?” I couldn’t stop the little hint of panic from jumping into my voice.
“I’m about to decorate the walls with a new shade of red if he doesn’t stop moving.” Kyle turned to face her and froze at the sight of the gun in her hand. “This motherfucker sold all of us out.”
Sally looked at me, begging me with her eyes to help her husband. If he sold us out, which was looking pretty damned likely, then I didn’t feel a lot of sympathy for him. Still, I didn’t want to kill my only friend on this planet’s husband for being a dick. If I had to make the choice I’d always choose family first. That is why I was stuck on this shithole of a planet again in the first place.
Rising from the couch, I moved towards Kyra and put my hand on her arm forcing her to lower the gun. “Kyle, why don’t you come back in here and sit down.”
He looked like he wanted to protest, but then Sally ran towards him and pulled him back into the living room. They took a seat on the couch together. Kyle was fuming and kept looking towards the door. Sally looked frightened, but not so much so that she wasn’t in control. The sound of a fist pounding on the door again made all of us jump.
“You did this to us. All of this is your fault,” Kyle said it flatly.
“It’s too bad you didn’t wait a little longer before you called it in because we had just offered to get you off this rock.” I tried to keep the tension out of my voice, but I didn’t succeed.
“Really?” He turned to look at Sally, who only nodded her head.
“Yes, we take care of our own. Something you could stand to learn a great deal about.” I turned and looked at the door so I could hide some of the disgust that must have been showing on my face. That and the real threat was outside, not sitting on the couch looking shocked.
At least he had the decency to look ashamed. I was sure that in his mind Kyle felt as though he had made the right choice to save his family, but all he had done was make everything worse. No one screwed with the company and came away unscathed. If he thought everything would go back to how it was after he turned me in then he was dumber than I thought.
“Now tell me, are you going to be a problem?” I really hoped the answer was no.
He looked at Sally and then back towards us. Kyra still had her gun out, but she was facing the door. “It doesn’t matter now.” He put his head in his hands and started sobbing. “They’re already here, and there is no other way out, for any of us.”
“Oh, there is always a way out.” That was something I had learned from listening to Drake and Maze when they were out on missions.
I looked over at Kyra, and she had her gun trained on the door now. The nagging and consistent knocking had stopped, and a few thuds sounded as something heavy smashed into the door. “If you’ve got a plan to get us out of this you better do it now,” Kyra said, sounding way more confident in my ability to get us out of this mess than I was.
Oh, I had a plan all right. Call the fucking captain. That was my plan. I linked my comm to the captain’s and waited for him to answer. “Captain, we’ve got a problem.”
“Well, we happen to have a little problem of our own right now,” Drake's voice came back.
“Does yours involve the company trying to kick in the front door?” If the Solaris Corporation was dumb enough to go after Drake’s team then they were going to lose a lot of good men, or at least some ok men that didn’t need to die over this mess.
“Nope, ours involves priests with blasters.” Drake's voice was cut off by the sound of gunfire.
Did he say, priests and blasters? What in the fuck was going on? “Just get here, now!”
The sound of blaster fire filled my ear, but I could just make out Drake’s gruff voice. “Set your beacon, we are on the way.”
I looked down at my belt and hit the switch to activate my tracker. Drake would be here soon, and everything would be ok. Say whatever you wanted about the man, but he had some kind of superpower when it came to extricating himself from being buried in shit up to his neck. The man was a survivor, and if you were on his crew he would always come for you. All we could do now was wait, and hope this incident didn’t cost us the chance to get Nick back home safely.
Chapter 19
Drake
The priests were firing at us from all directions. It didn’t seem like a very priestly thing to do, but hey, maybe their religion condoned violence against interlopers. The only good news was that they hadn’t found a way to shoot down at us. If they did that we would have some real problems.
Still, it wasn’t going to be much longer before the pews we were hiding behind were all blown to shit. I had wanted to avoid killing these men but that was off the table now. Our safety had to come first. It was time to let out our ace in the hole.
“Samantha, go to the right and give these assholes something to be afraid of.” She nodded once and then blurred off to the side of the church. “You two clean up the left.” I didn’t wait to see if they followed my orders. Samantha was already on the move, so I rose into a crouch and started firing towards the right side of the room to cover her.
Making sure to keep my bullets high and away from the actual shooters, I watched with horror and fascination as Samantha ripped through them. Her knife cut through the priests as easily as paper, and those were the lucky ones. The unlucky ones she tossed into the walls so hard that their backs snapped. It reminded me of watching a cat play with a mouse, except these mice weighed a hundred and eighty pounds, and the cat just left them screaming in agony instead of finishing them off.
Samantha had everything in hand to the right, so I turned towards the left to see if Gabe and Maze needed my help. I managed to squeeze off a few shots and may have even hit one of the priests before the roar of gunfire subsided. All we were left with now was the moaning of the men Samantha had broken. She gave me a questioning look, almost asking for permission to finish them off. It was tempting to give her the go ahead, but we needed to leave someone alive to spread the tale.
The man who sprang the ambush on us was still behind the pulpit. He had to have been unarmed or else he would have joined in the shooting. Standing I started to move forward. Bone chips crackled under my boots. They were going to need a lot of replacement bones to fix this mess. Fuck, they were going to need some new pews as well, and those columns were on the verge of disintegrating. This could have gone a different way, but all chances of that happening were over now. We were on the clock; Ice was in trouble, and I didn’t have time for this shit.
Maze and Gabe spread out to the sides, covering the bone pulpit as I continued slowly walking forward. I couldn’t see the priest yet, which had me feeling a little bit weary. The last thing I wanted was to be wrong about him being unarmed. If that little fucker shot me there was going to be hell to pay. Maze would probably end him the second it happened. That wouldn’t work for me, at least not until we found out if he had any answers.
Creeping around the edge of the pulpit, I saw the priest for the first time. He was shaking, back pressed firmly against the bones. There might have been a puddle of piss underneath him, but it wasn’t my place to judge him. Not everyone was cut out for being involved in a gunfight. The problem was, you never could figure out who was going to be able to keep their shit together without the bullets flying. This man wasn’t cut out for more than robbing the already downtrodden miners of their remaining scraps.
Reaching down, I knotted my fist into his robes and yanked the man to his feet. He let out a startled cry and tried to fall back to his knees. I wasn’t having any of it. “I don’t have time for any of this shit. Tell me where Nick is, and I might let you scurry back into that puddle you left behind.”
Trembling with tears streaming down his face the man muttered one word. “Osiris.”
“What in the fuck does that mean?” I shouted into his face.
“He has them, all of them.” His voice came out high pitched and shaking with nerves.
“All of who?” Now I was slightly confused. Sure on a planet like this, there had to be other missing people, but there was no way that many people could go missing from one city without raising major red flags. The Solaris Corporation would have noticed something like that. Not that they were altruistic, but when people stopped showing up to work, they were bound to want to get to the bottom of it. What had we stumbled into?
“The sacrifices. Osiris has the sacrifices, and tonight he will raise the one true god from his slumber. Jervonis will walk the planet again, and when he does he will shower us with wealth. Everything will come to pass as it has been foretold.”
Well, that explained a little bit about what was happening here. The priests of bones were batshit crazy. There wasn’t any other way to describe what I was hearing. They were about to make a human sacrifice to try and raise a god. Who in the fuck did something like that? What kind of person would possibly believe in this madness?
“Captain, we should go,” Maze urged, forcing me to look up from the sweaty piss covered priest in front of me.
People had forced the main doors open from the outside and were starting to enter the temple. This was exactly what I was afraid of. We couldn’t do our job with half the planet aligned against us. The company wasn’t going to be of any help, and if the miners rallied against us, we might not even make it off this rock with our lives.
“Point taken.” I lifted up my left hand and twirled my index finger around in a circle signaling it was time to pack up and move out. Pulling the priest forward with my right hand, I got right in his face, letting his fetid breath wash over me. “Where is Osiris?”
“He’s in the tombs, but you can’t stop him now. It’s too late. The timing isn’t perfect, Jervonis forgive me, but after this Osiris won’t be able to wait.”
Fuck. Did we go for Ice first or did we try and save her brother and hope that we could free her from the company’s clutches afterward? Getting her out of a top security prison would be tough. That was if we could even find her once the company spirited her away. If the company got their way, it was possible we would never see her again. Ice might hate me forever, but she was my family, and I was going to get her, despite what this man had just told me.
Maze and Gabe had already secured our exit out of the back of the temple. The miners that had ventured inside were all still crowded around the doors. That would buy us enough time to slip out of the back. There weren’t a lot of offworlders here so it wasn’t like we could hide from them for long if they had the inclination to find us. Shit, this entire mission had turned into a hot mess.
“The tombs, where are they,” I growled.
“You’ll never find them in time.” The priest started to laugh. It was the kind of laugh that let you know whatever tenuous grip he had on his sanity was gone forever.
“Let me.” Samantha moved up beside me.
I tossed the priest in her direction and fired a few shots towards the front of the temple, sending the people there scattering back through the doors. They wouldn’t realize that the shots hit twelve feet above their heads, at least not until after we were long gone. I hated having to scare them, but we needed to make as clean of a getaway as we could.
Samantha pulled the priest in so close that they almost looked like lovers as she sank her fangs into his throat. Her eyes rolled up into her head as she drained him. Was it wrong that I felt a slight pang of jealousy? It wasn’t that I wanted to be bitten. That didn’t hold a lot of interest for me, but part of me still wanted to find myself wrapped in that steel embrace. I had to shake myself out of it. We had more important things to worry about than my libido and what Maze would do to the offending member if I ever touched Samantha with it.
Samantha pulled free from the priest’s neck and let his body drop to the ground. “I know where we have to go.”
“Just keep that place as fresh in your mind as you can, we’ve got another problem to deal with first.” She shot me a questioning look but didn’t ask me anything. I was thankful for her silence. Ice’s comm had gone dark, it was time to move if we ever wanted the chance to see her again.
When we reached the door, Gabe and Maze slipped through it with us hot on their heels. I had the location of Ice’s las
t transmission on my wrist so I sprinted ahead to lead the way. The crew knew if I was running this hard then it had to be something serious. All of them matched my speed with ease, and we were on the way to save our girl. Three blocks later we were clear of the temple and despite the burning in my side and lungs I didn’t slow down.
“The company came for Ice. At least I think that is what happened.” I managed to say through the ragged gasps of air I was fervently trying to suck in.
“Let’s move.” Samantha blurred past us after sneaking a quick look at my wrist to see which direction Ice’s beacon was coming from.
“She better not kill them all before I get there,” Gabe grumbled as he picked up the pace.
Maze stayed silent, but I knew she was thinking the same thing. All of us wanted a piece of whoever thought they could fuck with our crew. If that wasn’t enough to worry about, we had the location of Ice’s brother in hand, but would we be able to make it to both of them in time? If we could only save one it had to be Ice, even if she left us forever. Fuck, sometimes I hated this shit.
It wasn’t my wrist that led us the last few blocks towards Sally Kim’s house. It was the sound of gunfire, and the realization that things had just spiraled even further out of control.
Chapter 20
Ice
“Get your husband and your kids to the back of the house!” I shouted.
Sally’s husband moved out of the room without a further word, but Sally looked a little incredulous. “They aren’t going to hurt us.”
“Considering the fact they are already trying to kick in your front door, I’d say that’s debatable at best,” Kyra said.
Personally, I didn’t think it was debatable at all. If that door didn’t give soon they were more than likely going to start shooting. That put everyone inside of this house at risk. The last thing I wanted was for Sally and her family to get hurt after all they had done for us.
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