Rashid had his head cocked to the side.
“Do you have any idea what—” Emma started to ask, but was interrupted.
“Shh!”
Rashid jammed his meaty thumb on the button to roll down his window. A loud voice echoed through the concrete canyons of the city. Multiple speakers seemed to be spouting the same thing. It was some kind of speech, in Arabic.
“What is he saying?” Emma asked.
Rashid pulled out his cell as he listened. Checking its screen apparently didn’t shed any light on the situation as the worry lines on his cheeks and forehead persisted.
“He’s saying the last days have come,” Rashid said, clearly struggling to process it as he translated. “He calls on all people of the Jerusalem and the Levant to rise up . . . arm themselves, fight with them . . . to take back their homeland.” Rashid locked eyes with Emma. “It’s the Defenders of Glory.”
Emma felt the blood freeze under her skin. She’d heard about these people, their methods. She opened the translator on her cell and watched the screen as the male voice kept speaking.
Soldiers of the Terran Confederacy, shed your uniforms. Join the revolution for the freedom of your brothers and sisters, your neighbors and friends. The sun is setting on the globalists, and it is rising on the free people of the Levant!
Some strange, piercingly loud hiss resounded outside the auto behind Emma. A rocket zipped past them overhead, leaving a gauzy gray smoke trail behind it, and streaked straight into the giant Confed e-banner, causing a messy, fiery explosion. The e-banner blinked out. Debris flew through the air and rained down on fleeing pedestrians. The streets turned to chaos as people ran, screaming, some hobbling or holding wounded limbs. Smoke obscured the Confed building. Armed soldiers in uniform rushed out the main doors and formed a semicircular perimeter.
Somewhere behind the auto, Emma heard an impassioned cry rise above the fracas.
“All glory to Gahhhhhd!”
The next moment, the horrible clatter of gunfire permeated the space between buildings. Rounds ripped the air just outside the window, hailing on the Confed guards ahead. A line of them convulsed with hits and went down just as another group of soldiers dashed outside to return fire. But the Terrans clearly weren’t prepared for a fight as they fired from the open. The unseen Defenders made quick work of them, dropping more than twenty in five seconds.
Rashid set his jaw, popped the door open, and discharged shots as fast as his finger would move. Emma flinched watching the flare of the muzzle. It didn’t take long for the return fire to come in the form of piercing thunks against the sloping trunk and into the back window. Emma slouched and covered her head as it shattered and sprinkled her shoulders with pieces of glass. Rashid let out a brief grunt as if he’d been punched in the gut. His handgun stopped firing. When Emma opened her eyes, she saw Rashid crumpled against his open door, circles of dark red forming around holes in his suit.
Emma clasped her hand over her mouth to prevent making a sound. Footsteps got closer behind the auto, accompanied by voices, speaking in rough Anglo.
“Street clear. Move up!”
She slid out of her seat to the floor of the cabin and pressed herself as flat as she could. A few passed by on either side of the auto, guns up, scarves covering from the nose to the neck, data goggles over their eyes. Emma tried to keep her breathing steady and quiet, but her heart hammered in her chest, demanding more oxygen. She heard a weak, faint moan from Rashid as he lifted his fingers to his wounds. One of the Defenders paused in front of Rashid’s body and sniped a burst of bullets into his head through a suppressed rifle barrel. It plowed a trench through Rashid’s skull and painted a bloody Jackson Pollock piece against the door.
Emma whimpered in terror at the sight, immediately regretting the sound. The faceless, alien-looking Defender snapped the aim of his rifle inside the cabin at the source of the sound.
“Got a live one, Captain,” came the muffled Defender’s voice.
Another figure, covered head to foot in combat equipment, appeared and popped his head into the cabin. “Civilian,” the gruffer voice said. “ID her and keep moving.” The captain stepped away and continued down the street.
Emma could see the digital data playing across the Defender’s goggles, its identification system working to pinpoint who she was and if she had any value to them. She panicked. If they found out who she was, they’d know she worked for the DDF, officially allied with the Confed.
The faceless Defender winced, then pulled himself out of the auto and looked the direction his commanding officer went.
“Captain!” he shouted. “Captain! She’s flagged as a VIP!”
Shit! Instinct took over. Emma reached up, threw open the door, and scrambled out. A long line of empty autos ran up the overpass they’d just crossed over, their passengers having apparently already fled. Both lanes had been blocked by a large, manually-driven truck with armor plating welded all around its back bed. A few Defenders unloaded equipment from cargo crates on it. Emma crouched and ran between the columns of autos.
“She’s running!” the Defender behind her yelled. “Someone stop her!”
Emma glanced over her shoulder as the Defender who’d discovered her leaped over the hood of the auto into the aisle where she ran. She ducked between two autos to the far side of the overpass, but as soon as she looked forward again, she found another scarfed Defender staring her down ten meters ahead. He lifted his weapon reflexively, and Emma sprang back into the middle aisle, then sprinted as fast as her feet would take her.
“Don’t shoot!” someone shouted behind her. “She’s a VIP!”
She’d almost passed the truck when a Defender stepped out from behind an auto and swung his gun barrel straight into her forehead, knocking her backwards onto her shoulder blades. The back of her head pounded against the concrete and jostled her brain. Her vision went light and blurry. Sound became more distant. She registered three scarf-covered faces staring down at her, then gave in to the darkness.
Chapter Thirty-One
Orion Arm, in orbit around the planet Earth . . .
Davin played a mind-numbing connect-the-dots game on his tab as he numbed his mind further with occasional sips of whiskey. Kiki, strapped onto the couch, clasped the indented seam of the cushion and stared unblinkingly at the big screen, tuned to a Confed news channel. At least, Davin figured it was owned by the Confed as the polished female anchor couldn’t seem to go two minutes without reassuring her kindle viewers that the violence in Jerusalem would soon be put to an end. Also, every few minutes or so, they would play footage of the bus bombing from a few days prior, and the anchor would remind her kindly viewers about the sort of terrorists that these Defenders were.
Strange floated upside down in the kitchenette, munching on a kelpbar as she absently scanned the cabinets for her next snack to eat. Davin sensed she was mad at him, that she blamed him for Jabron and Jai. Or maybe just that their memory still haunted every square centimeter of this place. Every moment of laughter and liquor-fueled pseudo-intellectual conversation. Every regrettable decision to ask Jai how the science of something worked. Every surprisingly profound musing aired by Jabron long into what should’ve been their sleeping hours. Davin felt it, too—that aching hollow inside himself for all of it. That ever-present sense of something missing, something they’d left behind.
He took another draw of whiskey, that smooth, merciful elixir.
Kiki huffed at something on the news. Davin paused his game and looked up, realizing he hadn’t heard anything the anchor said for the past few minutes.
“Nothing but lies about us,” Kiki muttered.
The news showed footage from a hovercam high above the city. Slanting columns of charcoal-colored smoke rose at a dozen places. The title banner read, “Radical Group Terrorizes Jerusalem.” To Davin’s un-indoctrinated eye, the situation seemed comically ludicrous: two biases playing off each other. On the one hand, the Confed portrayed the Defenders as
radicals and terrorists, and on the other, Kiki couldn’t see anything wrong with a city set on fire and civilian corpses in the streets. One was blind in the left eye, the other was blind in the right.
Kiki smashed her fist into the couch cushion. “We have to go back.” She trained her sharp eyes on Davin. “Take me back.”
Davin laughed. “Nah, nah, nah. Too late for that. We’re not going back down there.”
She gestured at the screen. “They need me! This is the day we’ve been waiting for. Years, decadeswe’ve been waiting.”
He shrugged. “If you want to catch a shuttle or something . . .” He trailed off as his nexband vibrated on his wrist. The thin screen on the underside of it displayed Ernie’s name.
Davin pressed a button on the nexband and flicked his wrist toward the big screen. Ernie’s smugly grinning face replaced the news channel. He rocked forward and back in his desk chair in front of a wide window. His high-situated office looked out on an impressive cityscape set amidst the desert.
“Vatooo!” he exclaimed in celebration. “Does your homeboy come through or what?”
Davin straightened himself in his lazyboy. “You got her location?”
Strange drifted over from the kitchenette.
“Check it out.” Ernie tapped a few keys on his keyboard. The screen changed to a map of the Milky Way. “Had to call in a favor with a guy in Levant division. Weird dude. I don’t know if he has a face under all that beard. Anyway, he managed to track the space gate pingbacks into Carina. All the way to . . .” The screen zoomed in on an area of Carina just south—rimward—of the Owl Nebula, near the border with Sagittarius. A blinking blue dot marked the target system. Maybe fifteen or sixteen gates outside Orion space. Doable.
“A planet called . . . Zygur,” Ernie said, pausing before the name’s pronunciation. “But here’s the catch: The entire planet—the entire system actually—is owned by a company called TransTek. They’re in the military tech industry, lots of contracts with the Carinian government. A million sharebucks says they got some pretty tight security. That ship ID should get you across the border, but hell if I know how you’ll get to Zygur.”
Davin sat back and crossed his arms over the wrappings under his shirt. “Huh. That could be a problem. Know anything about their setup in that system?”
“Eh, not much,” Ernie said. “It’s a research and dev zone. Marked as restricted space by the Ministry of Arms. But they got tons of those around Carina.”
“Do they ever work with Orionite companies?”
The map disappeared, replaced by Ernie in his office again. “Donno. But I see where you’re going with that. I’ll look into it,hombre.”
“Thanks,luchador,” Davin said. “We’re gonna burn for the border, but message me as soon as you find out anything.”
Strange touched Davin on the shoulder. “I’ll set a course.” She propelled herself toward the cockpit tube.
Ernie took a second to respond. “Luchador? You know what that means?”
Davin shrugged. “Nah. Sounded good.”
“You called me a wrestler. Like, the guys who wear the masks.”
Davin pooched out his lower lip and nodded, imagining it. “You could pull it off.”
Ernie laughed, said “Screw you,vato,” and ended the vizchat. The big screen went blank.
Davin looked at Kiki, who seemed unhappy about the development. She stared down at the floor for a while.
“Want us to drop you off at a travelers’ station?” Davin asked.
Her eyes sliced up at him. “That’s just what you’d want, isn’t it?”
“Well . . . yes.”
She inhaled through her nostrils, then found the buckle on her restraints. “No. I have a job to do. Let’s do it, then we go back.” She unbuckled and thrust herself back to the private rooms, where she’d taken over Jai’s old space.
Davin hadn’t expected that. “No, wait,” he said dryly. “I take it back. Please stay.”
He sighed and pulled up his tab to run a search on TransTek, see what he could find out.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Orion Arm, on the planet Earth . . .
Siraj ducked into a long, awning-shaded marketplace nestled between buildings to escape the flurry of gunfire criss-crossing the street. The narrow bazaar’s vendors and merchants had fled, leaving behind many of their wares. Racks of t-shirts hung idly. Flies buzzed around open boxes of fresh fruit. Steam rose off of meat and falafels cooking on stoves.
Outside, all around, the Defenders’ pre-recorded speeches reverberated through the city from the public announcement speakers. Winning more fighters to their ranks, Siraj hoped.
His team filed into the empty bazaar after him, one by one, running in when the enemy fire died down and gave them an opening. Each of them hauled vests stuffed with spare magazines and carried their own combat rifles, cobbled together with various gun parts that didn’t seem to match each other. Ten soldiers had come in, now hiding inside the stands and catching their breath. The feeling of bullets landing and ricocheting nearby stole a man’s breath as easily as running with fifteen kilos of equipment.
There was a rising rumble overhead like a slowly unfurling roll of thunder. Security drones. One more team member—Azzam, judging from the Superman symbol on his scarf—came rushing around the corner toward the bazaar. The air split with the deafening crack of heavy gunfire above. Siraj gasped but had no time to react before lightning fast rounds rained down on Azzam, one slicing through his shoulder, another through his thigh, another through the ribs, and a last exploding through his skull. The young man, probably no older than twenty, was dead before his body hit the ground.
Another of Siraj’s team members cried out and stepped into the open to aim his gun at the security drones. He managed to pinch off a single three-round burst before the drones tore up his body and the pavement all around him.
“Stay in cover!” Siraj shouted.
The drones moved further down the street, picking off Defenders as they went. From his vantage point, Siraj saw a few volunteers they’d picked up along the way leave a covered doorway to make a run for it. The potshots fired from their handguns did nothing but draw the drones’ attention faster. Without armor, the pair of volunteers were ripped to bloody tatters. They wouldn’t have stood a chance with body armor either, but the lack of it made their deaths messier.
Siraj tapped a button on his stubby earpiece to switch to the HQ channel.
“Qasim, how close are you with the security drones?”
The response took a few seconds. It started with an agitated sigh.
“Nothing yet, Siraj,” Qasim’s voice said in his ear, bearing hints of exasperation and annoyance. “They know I’m in their system. They’re cutting me off every time I get close. If I’d had a few more days—”
“Youdon’thave a few more days!” Siraj barked. “My people are dyingright now. I need you to get those drones offline. Quick as possible.”
Qasim exhaled heavily. “I’m on it.”
Siraj switched back to his team channel. They were chattering frantically about the drones, still nearby but further down the street now.
There was movement on the far end of the slender, cluttered bazaar. Siraj lifted his semi-auto rifle and peered through the scope. For a few seconds, he saw nothing and thought it might’ve been his imagination. Then, moving briskly, a group of Confed soldiers poured around the corner and into the corridor, headed their direction.
“Behind us!” Siraj hissed, getting his team’s attention. “Hold fire! Stay hidden.”
His team members slowly turned around and positioned themselves. The echoing of gunfire and explosions from every direction covered the sounds of their movements. From the speed with which the Confed soldiers moved—with their weapons down—it seemed they didn’t see Siraj’s team. Probably planned to sneak through the bazaar and flank the Defenders. Still around forty meters out, more flooding in.
Siraj eased himself into t
he bulk of t-shirts and jackets giving him cover and adjusted his scope. At somewhere around thirty soldiers, the flow from the far entrance stopped. Siraj looked at their faces, all of them tense. Some scared. Some resolute. Many races represented among them—European, Asian, African. No locals. No sons of the Sacred Land. Siraj followed the point man, an American or perhaps Englishman, with his reticle.
“Open fire on my shot,” he whispered.
Thirty meters out. Twenty-five. Twenty.
Siraj squeezed the trigger. With the rush of pulse and adrenalin, he hardly heard the crack of the shot, only felt the bounce of the gun and saw three of the foremost Confed soldiers recoil and fall. A din of gunshots erupted behind him, plowing into the Confed soldiers. They shuddered with hits and went down in a wave. It only took seconds for the confusion to fade and the return fire to come. Hanging clothes fluttered and ripped with the whizzing bullets. Siraj heard pained grunts behind him as he snapped off shot after shot. He nailed a Confed soldier in the temple just under the helmet, blowing an orange-sized chunk of his head off, then clipped another in the shoulder.
“I’m out!” shouted one of his team members. “Relo—”
A fleshythunk cut him off, followed by a terrible, desperate gurgling.
Siraj realized he had no solid cover—nothing that could block or even slow a bullet—and lowered himself to a prone position. All around him, the stands were being torn apart. Holes blown in signs and plastic crates. Glass cooler doors shattering. Tomatoes splattering.
Another Defender grunted and fell out of cover, landing facedown in the aisle. The smack of his skull against the concrete was audible even through the din of gunfire. Blood pooled out under his motionless body.
“Grenade out,” someone said in Siraj’s ear.
He saw the fist-sized black blur streak down the corridor. A breath later, the Confed soldiers panicked and scrambled, but not fast enough. The quick explosion silenced several of them. Siraj took the opportunity to push up to one knee and lean out to aim. He sniped one squarely in the gut before a searing pain bit into the fleshy curve of his shoulder. Not a direct hit, but deep enough to dig into the muscle. Stray round. Still hurt like the wrath of God.
Horns of the Ram (Dominion Book 2) Page 15
