CRACK. Crack. CRACK. Crack.He and Kiki both pinched off shots, one after the other. The missile glided closer every second, unhindered. So close.Soclose.
“Hundred twenty meters, Cap!” Strange wailed in Davin’s ear. “Take it out!”
Davin inhaled sharply and held his breath, steadying the reticle on the soulless missile. It jiggled around the tip, going above, the below, all around it, hardly staying on the moving target for a half second. His heart hammered in his chest. Finally, he got it squarely behind the reticle, squeezed the trigger—
The ship rolled, tipping the aft end downward. Davin’s shot went astray. So did one of Kiki’s. The floor began vibrating under his feet.
“Strange!” Davin yelled inside his helmet. “Hold it steady, dammit!”
“We’re hitting atmo!” she yelled back, directly into his ears. “I had to adjust our tilt or we’ll burn up!”
Davin clenched his teeth and tried aiming again. The vibration worked up his legs, through his body, down his arms to his rifle. The reticle bounced around as he struggled to keep it on the missile. Kiki fired off rounds every other second, getting desperate.
“Sixty meters, Cap!” Strange shrieked. “Fifty!”
Steady. . . . Davin let out his breath. Slow. Controlled. Waiting for exactly the right moment.
He pulled the trigger. The explosion came instantly, and it was enormous and terrifying. Shards of debris pinwheeled through empty space directly toward them.
Kiki gasped and ducked swiftly as a sheet of jagged metal whipped into the locker room and caught the wire attached to her back, ripping off the carabiner and anchor loop. It yanked her boots off the floor and threw her body against the inner airlock door, landing hard. She let out a pained grunt and immediately bounced back toward the other side of the airlock. Her gloved hands flailed, trying to grab hold of something, but nothing was in reach.
Davin reacted fast, punching the button to close the outer airlock door. The ramp eased up as Kiki spun through the vacuum space toward it, panicking and hyperventilating in her helmet.
“Davin!” she cried helplessly, her gloved fingertips touching nothing as her body approached open space.
He pried his boots off the floor, leaped to the ramp door, hooked a recess with one hand, and shot out the other to catch Kiki’s arm as she turned back over. His stubby, gloved fingers raked down her dermasuit-clad forearm to her palm and bent to latch with her own bent glove fingers. The force of her weight bearing the opposite direction almost yanked them apart. Their fingers slipped a few millimeters, but held. With the outer ramp door only a meter open, and closing, Kiki reached her other hand to Davin’s and tugged her helmeted head back inside, then planted another hand against the ramp door and gave herself another push. Her body slithered through the narrowing gap, so narrow she had to turn her boots sideways to slip them through.
The ramp door closed and sealed itself into an airtight lock. Everything shook violently as the atmosphere thickened outside the hull.
Kiki clutched a handlebar on the far side of the airlock and hugged it, looking back at Davin with wide, unblinking eyes.
“I never . . .” she said between heaving breaths, “want to do that . . . again.”
Chapter Forty-Six
Orion Arm, on the planet Earth . . .
Kastor’s feet crunched on broken glass as he stepped to a blown-out hole in the third story apartment wall that had once been a window. This place had once been someone’s home, the sort of uniform hovel found in these grids of stacked housing. The worn couches and chairs in the living area had been arranged around a holofield console in the center of the room. E-sketch pads clinging to the refrigerator by magnets displayed colorful, childlike depictions of smiling faces and some kind of four-legged animals. Pans still rested on the glassy, black stovetop, crusted on the inside with the burnt remnants of the residents’ last meal before the fighting started.
A warm and cozy place once, Kastor realized. Not anymore. Razors of glass and wedges of plaster littered the carpet from this opening blasted out of the wall. Dried blood caked the floor around Kastor’s feet from the poor soul who’d been hiding in here. A faint, smeared line of it snaked across the living room to the coat closet by the front door. Kastor had left the closet door closed—no need to look upon the obvious.
Out the hole in the wall, beyond the landscape of rooftops, the first hints of sunrise pierced the horizon. Below, a team of armed Defenders, each with scarves concealing their faces, herded the last few shivering Carinian captives into a tight group with twenty-some others. Innocent civilians, each of them. Guilty only of being born of Carinian parents on a Carinian planet. Kastor had picked out each of them himself. Some old, bearing the wrinkled skin of those of common blood. Others of middle age, huddling together and whispering about what to do, asking what was happening to them. All childless men and women, or those with progeny old enough to care for themselves.
Kastor loathed the task before him.If you cannot but cause the innocent to suffer, be decisive and cause as little of it as possible. The words from his former trainers at academy, no matter how many times repeated in his head, weren’t a balm. These were rabble of common blood, far lower than nobility, but they possessed value. They had parents, siblings, friends, thoughts, dreams, hopes. Noblemen had obligations to them just as they had obligations to the nobility. The commoner gave his labor to the nobleman, and the nobleman gave protection and fair treatment in return. At least, that’s the story Kastor had always heard.
This lot, though foreigners to Kastor, deserved better.
The Defenders positioned themselves in a semi-circle around the Carinian civilians, who were cornered between two buildings on either side and a concrete wall stretching high above their heads behind. Floodlights set on tripods illuminated the whole courtyard. One of the Defenders tapped a few buttons on a tablet to make a small, lightweight hovercam hum to life and lift off the ground. The Defender experimented with it, moving his fingers around the tablet in various ways to learn how the hovercam moved.
Kastor’s earpiece crackled as a new line opened.
“Advisor, what in God’s holy name are you doing?” came the frenzied voice of Siraj.
Kastor inhaled a long, full breath, incapable of being shaken from his melancholy state.
“Qasim told me what you’re planning to do,” Siraj continued. “Youcannotdo this! It isnotwhat we stand for! The Defenders of Glorydo not kill innocent civilians!”
“Of course you do,” Kastor replied. “Who was it who planted the bombs in that public bus?”
“It wasyou who ordered that attack!” Siraj almost yelled into the microphone.
“You can’t blame it all on me,” Kastor said, watching the hovercam strafe over the group of huddled Carinians below. “Before I came here, how many Confed officers’ throats did you slit? How many politicians did you assassinate? Did they not have families? Children? How many Confed buildings did you bomb? Were there not civilians mixed in with the combatants in them?”
“Yes, we have blood on our hands, too,” Siraj said. “We’ve killed. We’ve caused pain. But not like this. What you are doing is foolishness. It’s evil.Stand down.”
“Siraj, you accepted my help because youneeded it,” Kastor said, hearing a hollowness in his own voice, a vacuum where there should have been passion. “You told me you were willing to do what must be done in order to win this city. I took you at your word.”
“What will this accomplish?” Siraj demanded. “Tell me. What will it accomplish?”
Kastor closed his eyes and let out an inaudible sigh. What, indeed. Kastor had no convincing answers.
“You have to trust me,” he said. “I’ve brought you this far, and I can deliver you the rest of Jerusalem, but you have to let me do itmy way.”
“No!” Siraj exclaimed defiantly. “Stand down!Donot go through with this! You don’t have my—”
“Focus on getting your fighters to the Old City,” Kas
tor said. “I’ll do what’s necessary to keep the Carinians at bay.”
He reached up to his ear and tapped the power button on his earpiece to shut off all communications. Down in the courtyard, the leader of the Defender team looked up at Kastor, who waiting in the shadows three stories above. The leader watched for Kastor’s signal as the Carinians trembled and whimpered. Some begged for their lives, stepping forward toward the Defenders. Each time they had a gun pointed at them and were commanded to get back.
Kastor’s chest ached with pity. How often throughout the history of civilization had innocent people like these been subjected to the gun at the order of a leader like him only to be brushed off dismissively as “collateral damage?” They were pawns on the galaxy’s chessboard, hurled into the gunfire for purposes grander and more worthwhile than their tiny lives. They were fodder for the gristmill of power from which only a few great men could draw.
Upon Kastor’s shoulders rested the potential to become one of those great men.
He dropped his eyes down to the Defender leader and gave a single, solemn nod. The Defender nodded back. The camera operator maneuvered the hovercam to film the leader with the Carinians in the background. He gave a wave to signal the go-ahead.
“This is a message for all of Carina, and especially for its leaders.” The leader spoke with anger under the surface of his every accented word. “The Defenders of Glory know of your desire to destroy us, to seize control of Earth and of our holy places. We willnot accept this. Carina, with its friends in the Terran Confederacy, have oppressed the people of the Levant for a hundred years, and we have had enough. We’ve had enough of foreigners looting our homeland and crowding us out of our own neighborhoods. We will not be ruled by the Confed, and neither will we be ruled by Carina.”
The Defender leader half-turned to look at the group of trembling civilians.
“If you do not care about our independence for our own sake, you should care about it for the sake of your people. We hold tens of thousands of your pilgrims here in our city. If you move on Earth and threaten our freedom, they will all meet the same fate as those gathered here.”
Kastor turned away from the blown-out window and walked back into the living room of the apartment. A suffocating tightness gripped him like a giant snake coiling around his body.
From the courtyard, he heard a chorus of voices yell out “All glory to God!” before the guns started blaring. Kastor closed his fists and clenched his teeth as he listened to the desperate screams slipping through a heavy clatter of gunfire. For a split second’s time, amidst the macabre cacophony, he thought he could make out the familiar, terrible scream of Pollaena, crying out as the blade pierced her flesh. Then the gunfire stopped. It barely lasted five seconds. A profound silence took its place. The breeze picked up for a moment before dying back down.
Kastor let out his breath. The tension loosened in his shoulders and abdomen. The quiet brought a bit of relief.
He lifted his wrist and tapped a button on his cuff.
“It’s done.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
Orion Arm, on the planet Agora . . .
Jade threw open the front door to the bar, letting in the cool night air.
“Later boys!” she shouted back at the smoke-laced room of tattooed, rough-edged patrons—mostly men, but also some women sturdy enough to repel the horndogs. Jade gave a wave to her usual crew still playing cards around one of the circle tables and patted the wad of sharebucks in the chest pocket of her pleather jacket. “Maybe you’ll bring your A-game next time, eh fellas?”
A chorus of jeers and comebacks followed her out the door, so many she couldn’t discern what any one of them was saying. She laughed and swung the door closed. The sudden silence felt nice. The electro-core music was too loud in there. They always played it louder on the weekends, despite her objections. God forbid they play something derived from real guitars or—gasp!—live music every now and again.
Jade stuffed her hands into her jacket pockets and waded further into the network of dingy alleys that zigzagged back toward her apartment building. Her body felt nice and floaty from the bock beers. Stuff tasted like jet fuel, but it was the only thing brewed on Flotsam. The Scrap Queen liked to keep it local.
She heard footsteps pick up behind her—someone approaching. At this time of night, in these alleyways, someone approaching meant trouble. She kept walking, pretending not to notice, but casually reached a hand into her jacket, feeling for the butt of her handgun with her fingertips. The footsteps didn’t stop. She wrapped her fingers around the handle, pointer finding the trigger guard.
“Jade?” A man’s voice. “Jade Ramey?”
She turned around, keeping her hand on the gun inside her jacket. In the dim, artificial white light, a tall and—for Flotsam—well-dressed man walked toward her. Good-looking, too, with genuine eyes and concerned frown on his face.
“Yeah?” Jade replied.
“Thank God,” the stranger said, too well-spoken to be a Flotsam native. Sounded like he was from the city. “I’ve been looking all over for you. Didn’t see you at the scrap market today.”
“Had some other business to attend to,” Jade said cautiously, examining the stranger who continued to edge closer. “Speaking of business, what’s yours with me?”
The man glanced over his shoulder nervously. “I work with Jimmy Powers.” He paused a moment. “Look, something bad happened. Jimmy . . . Jimmy’s dead.”
Jade took a step back. “What? What are you talking about?”
The stranger shook his head, eyebrows scrunched. “Didn’t make any sense. They said it was some kind of drug overdose, but they found him at the office with a bunch of pills. But . . . I know the guy. He wouldn’t do something like this.” He shook his head again. “Listen, I think somebody . . . you know.”
“Murdered him?” Jade asked, juggling her wariness of this guy with her shock at the news about Jimmy. If it was even true.
“Yeah! I’ve wracked my brain about it, trying to figure out why, and . . . well, the only thing I can think of is . . . Sierra Falco.” He watched her as he said that name. “I was the only other one at the office who knew about her.”
Jade decided to play it coy. “Sierra Falco, the prima filia? Why would you think it’s about her?”
“After they found him, I went through his computer,” the stranger said. “All his messages from Davin—you know Davin, right?”
“Yeah.”
“All his messages from Davin were gone. Deleted. The video messages, audio messages, text messages, everything. And that’s not the worst part. There’s more.” He pulled a cell out of his pocket. “I was the one who confirmed his identity. I snapped a picture of his body at the morgue. Can I show you?”
Jade loosened toward him. The story was too detailed to be made up. How else would this guy know so much about Jimmy and Davin and Sierra?
“Yeah,” she said. “Show me.”
He walked to her with his cell, stopping beside her and tapping the screen.
“What’d you say your name is?” she asked.
The worry lines in the stranger’s face relaxed all at once.
“I didn’t,” he said, then turned the screen of his cell toward Jade and pressed a button on the side to emit a blindingly bright flash.
Jade shrieked and stumbled backwards, burning eyes squeezed shut. She held one hand over them while she pulled out her handgun with the other. The stranger moved swiftly to grab the gun and twist it out of her hand. A half second later, the side of his hand karate chopped into her throat, making her stumble backwards into a brick wall, choking for air. She slid down to her ass and held a hand over her throat. The stranger took a step toward her, and then she felt something bite into the side of her neck like a bee sting.
As she blinked away the bright blotches in her vision, she noticed her muscles quickly weakening. Soon, she couldn’t even hold her arms up. Her hands fell to the ground. She’d been turned into
a rag doll.
The stranger knelt down in front of her, unrolled a thin cloth on the ground, set down a syringe, then fished out a small bottle of whiskey from the inner pocket of his trench coat. He carefully set that down beside the syringe and rested both forearms on his knee.
“You know, Jade, over the course of my career, I’ve realized something about lying. The most believable lies are the ones that actuallyaren’t lies . . . except in a few details.”
He turned around his cell to show the screen. Jade started to squint, expecting another flash, but instead, the screen displayed a picture of Jimmy Powers slumped in his desk chair at Golding.
“Like who I work for,” the stranger said, putting his cell away. “I’ll admit now that it’s not Golding Commercial Aerospace Consultants.” He grinned.
Jade tested her lips and found she could still move them. “Who . . . whodo you work for?”
The stranger shrugged. “Someone who is very interested in finding out who all on Agora knew about Sierra Falco.”
Jade closed her eyes and let out a ragged sigh. “Go to hell, theocrat piece of shit.”
His grin flickered. “Colorful.”
“Whaddyu want from me, cocksucker?”
“I want you to cooperate,” the stranger said. “Because if you don’t—” He picked up the syringe and tapped the needle against the whiskey bottle. “Let’s just say, someone will discover tomorrow that you drank a lot more at the bar than anyone thought. It’ll be very sad, a woman’s life ended in her prime. Just like your friend Jimmy Powers with the pills. Very, very sad.”
His eyes penetrated her mercilessly. “It took a long time before Jimmy would tell me anything. And you know, even in the end, I got the sense he was holding something back, not telling me something. I won’t have that problem with you, will I, Jade?”
Horns of the Ram (Dominion Book 2) Page 22
